Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Yesterday I managed to accomplish some overdue errands, was stymied regarding another errand by someone else's phone problem, still had various things left undone, got treated to Thai food (yum!) and conversation, and crashed really early -- and hard. So I found myself waking up at seven instead of trying to fall asleep at seven. The morning looks different this way. And now I'll try to say something interesting about the weather.

A couple of days ago I was freezing my fingers and toes. Then this warm front moved through. Today another cold front is expected (I saw a low of 11F forecasted for the morning of Boxing Day), but right now outdoors is warmer than some parts of my house. (Yes, I'm currently letting some of that warmer air in. As I understand it, this situation isn't expected to last very long.)

My house warms and cools oddly, out of synch with the weather. It seems too funky to be merely the expected hysteresis, with temperatures continuing to climb up until dawn during the summer while the air outside is cooling, and some entire winter or spring days when the house stays colder than outdoors the whole day despite the solar heating that causes so much perspiration in the summer -- there are days I've bundled up against the expectation of colder weather outdoors, only to open the front door and discover I'm wearing too many layers. There's the expected cooling of the house more slowly than the outside temperature drops, thank goodness, but sometimes the thermal situation seems completely upside down. Or maybe it really is just hysteresis and it only seems more bizarre because of the timing of my observations.

Anyhow, there it is: currently, and maybe for another hour, I'm warming part of my house in December by opening a window. (And closing doors to the rooms that were already warmer.) And the weather in Baltimore has swung from below-freezing-all-day to mildly autumnal and is headed back to frosty again, all in the space of a week.

As long as I'm thinking about weather, I've been meaning to describe what I saw about a month ago, while driving up to Darkover ... You (well, most of you) know how a mountain range looks in the distance in the summertime, that indistinct coloured shape that puts the horizon way up there but is too far away (at least in summer haze) to resolve distinctly? Especially (for East Coast folks) the Blue Ridge as seen from the east? Well that's what I saw while I was driving to Darkover.

Except that to get to Timonium from Baltimore all I do is drive north a short distance, and all the mountains are a lot farther away and the ones that look like that are mostly to the west.

So there I was driving along I-83, paying attention to road conditions and the other cars, and grooving on the nifty "trip to the mountains" background visuals as it ever so slowly dawned on me that Something Was Wrong. Wait, it feels like a trip to the mountains ... it feels like I'm actually somewhere in Pennsylvania ... it looks like I'm in Virginia ... but ... I'm ... not. I'm in Maryland, and there are no mountains in Timonium. Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot? So I started paying attention to the more distant parts of my environment and realized that yes, there was in fact a very convincing mountain range in front of me, looming up in the distance beyond everything else. Okay, I was headed to a science fiction convention, but the idea that someone had moved a mountain range or perpetrated a spacewarp just to provide ambiance seemed a bit much, so I kept looking.

It took a surprising amount of time to discern that what I was seeing was one bloody freakish cloud bank, that managed to look exactly like mountains far off in the summer haze (but taller than most around here -- someday I'll have to visit the Rockies and compare). With clear sky overtop of it, and the sun coming from just the right angle to make it Not Look Like Clouds. Every time I turned my attention to the other cars around me, the scenery turned from cloud to mountains again. Sometimes it felt like I was approaching Front Royal and other times it felt more like the far side of Frederick on the way to Hagerstown, or someplace along I-83, depending on how much attention I was paying to the shape and colour of the mountaincloud and how much to the look of the roadside environment. It did not feel like Baltimore, Towson, or Timonium. I had to trust the road signs to tell me I was on the correct course.

The notion that things change in the fog has been visited by various fantasy authors, but I thought one had to be inside the fog, not viewing it as a distant cloudbank, for it to make things move around like that.

Who was it that commented that the Baltimore sky freaks her out? Okay, okay, it really does do freaky, not just unusually pretty, things! In a half-hour drive, I was transported to places 50-100 miles north, west, and southwest of my destination -- and fortunately, ultimately, to my intended destination.