Thursday, June 19, 2008

Lawnmowing, rainbows, and a brief preview

I tried to mow my lawn yesterday. I really meant to. I went to the house straight after work, jumped out of the car wielding a weedwhacker, and proceeded to whack weeds until the battery lost its charge. I then went inside to change and use the facilities.

While I was inside the rain that had been threatening to fall all afternoon began to fall. It came down hard, but only briefly, leaving the grass too wet to mow. Then the sun came out, bright and strong. Hmmm, I thought, maybe I will get to mow the lawn.

Then it started to rain again, and that was the end of that.

The rain had finished up and the sun was out again as I left the house. I looked to the East for a rainbow. It was just after 6:00, so the sun was pretty high and the rainbow was pretty low. There was a secondary rainbow, but - and I have never seen this before - it appeared to be non-concentric with the first. The lower legs seemed close to the main rainbow's, but the upper reaches seemed to be farther away. I am wondering if this was not an ordinary secondary rainbow, but was actually being generated by a "subsun" - a false image of the sun created by the reflection of the sun off of all the beads of water that had been left on every surface by what was essentially a double sunshower. I wish I had had my camera with me. By the time I got back here, both rainbows had faded.

So I never did mow that lawn. But today, between 6:45 and 9:15, I did mow my mom's entire lawn. So now I'm tired.

The upshot of all this is that I don't have the time or the energy to write the piece I wanted to write today. I need to gather a lot of illustrations for it, and some news reports, and I just can't get all that done before I have to get to bed. So to keep you in suspense and give you a preview of what is to come, I give you this:
More to follow.

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