I wish I had my Camera with me

One of the properties of Moscow is a wet winter and spring. We’re close enough to the coast to get the rainy weather patterns, yet far enough inland to incur the effects of the Cascades rain shadow. Though I suppose being at the foothills of the next major mountain divide, it’s only natural for the moisture to build up and then drop before passing into Montana. The rain here is more of a constant drizzle than the short, hard rains we’d get in the summer in the Appalachians. The drizzle will last all day. It’s the sort of grey rain that feels right if you’re sitting at home in front of the fire place napping all afternoon while watching movies. Unfortunately, that’s not a feasible option five days out of the week.

The surprising property of these rains is that they almost always end before sundown. Often enough, I’ve walked out of school to find the sun shining on the western horizon. The after-storm glow is magnificent. It illuminates the tall, white silos of the grainery in town with the dark purple clouds in the background. It paints Moscow Mountain in a golden glow. Moscow Mountain, by the way, has an abrupt white cap, a specific elevation where the precipitation remained snow and stuck to the trees. The overall warmth in color tones ease the cold, wet day, a perfect blend of color and contrast. It is this point where I kick myself for not thinking ahead.

I wish I had my camera.

Similar Posts

  • |

    My Research: What I have been up to

    Last week, the fruits of my last three year’s work has finally come to fruition in the journal PLoS One. The premise is that the personality behavior we call boldness, or the bold-shy continuum, is not only heritable, but a genetically correlated multivariate trait. The research is essentially a continuation of a project Mary Oswald completed for her dissertation, however upon first submission, reviewers criticized the study for its lack of replication. So, in the Summer of 2010, she set up a second selection experiment which I took over and have been maintaining since. Boldness is an interesting behavior to…

  • Adventures in fast, reliable ineternet

    For the past seven years, I have been living with slow, unreliable internet. In 2004-2005, the Weis Ecology Center was on dial-up service. Camp McDowell in Alabama was also on dial-up service, shared on a wireless network. If you can remember far enough back when dial-up was the forefront of home internet technology, you might also remember how long it took for webpages to load and how it would randomly lose connection, and then the busy signals trying to reconnect. In 2006, those problems had not improved. Ferry Beach had a more reliable connection, though it was still slow. I’m…

  • Life at Camp

    I haven’t been very good at updating this or my livejournal in a while. I’ve been fairly busy for the past few weeks. I returned to my job at the mountain campus (www.mountaincampus.org, check us out) in the middle of March and spent the first two weeks cleaning up and preparing for the season. With all of the heavy snow this winter, we had a fair number of trees fall in critical places, so we spent the better part of a week removing some of them. It’s been so wet, though, that we can’t get to all of them with…

  • Fall Foliage

    I’ve been spending a lot of time finishing up my dissertation proposal, which is due in a little over a week, and that has kept me from taking time to enjoy the outdoors. We got some considerable rain over the past weekend which lead to some dramatic skies and really clear views on Monday and Tuesday, but I just wasn’t able to take advantage of the nice conditions. I did get out for a little bit yesterday afternoon to check out the fall foliage in the arboretum on campus. In Idaho, we don’t see very much fall color. There are…

  • Photography

    Grafton Street, Dublin Originally uploaded by mineral2. I’m scanning old photos again. Its the first time in probably a month since I’ve been archiving photos. I skipped over a few and am doing a more “recent” set from the summer of 2001. Ireland. Its 6 rolls of color and one of black and white. I’ll probably post a few up here as I scan them, but expect the full set on the website when they are all completed. To scan after this: London 1999, 2000; Scotland 1999; Drew University 2000, 2001 and some random bits in between.