Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Sunrise and Sunset in Wilton Manors

I am trying to reset my clock.  I should probably just ignore it.

What I mean is that since the Time Change is coming, I should do what I do every year and stop trying to "sleep in" because when Spring Ahead comes in a couple weeks, I'll be getting up at a normal hour anyway.

Normal is just a setting on the clothes dryer anyway, right?

Yes, I still get up at Stupid O'Clock, but as Einstein will tell you, Time Is Relative, anyway.

I almost never am up after dawn, and I almost always have foot and paws to pavement on the first dog walk before then.

Mind you, while you are laying in bed, drooling into the pillows, snoring and rolling over to let the blood flow back into your arms, there are things you are missing.

The mornings here can be pretty amazing.  In the case of the sunrises, they can be stunning.  I live about 2 miles from the beach, that is 3 Kilometers.  Wilton Manors, Florida.  If I stand in the street in front of my house I can just clearly see the top floors of the hotels at the beach. 

In this part of the world, having a clear sky is not all that common.  I mean literally completely devoid of clouds.  It's the Tropics.  There is a lot of humidity here.  Typically there is a line of clouds that form well off shore that you can just barely see the tops of on a clear day.  They tend to dissipate once the sun comes up and it used to be that you could predict afternoon thunderstorms between 3 and 4 in the afternoon.  Too many people have moved here and created a heat island, but if you go to the smaller cities just North of us, that weather pattern still exists.   Fort Pierce for example.

I once was told by an Old Florida Hand that he knew when he was Up North when the stripe of sweat down his back disappeared.  Sure it would be hot up there, but the humidity keeps our backs damp.  Hard to explain to you people up North like in say the Carolinas...

But the clouds come through and decorate the skies.  Little Puffy Clouds, sometimes coalescing into showers or storms too small for Radar to spot, would float past, leave spots on the car, then move off somewhere else.  Keep the flowers blooming.

Those clouds do something else right around Sunrise and Sunset.  It captures those first or last rays of the sun that have traveled through many more miles of air than they would at noon due to the angle of attack.  Longer wavelengths of light such as blues and greens get stripped away and the clouds light up in brilliant yellows, then orange, then finally red as they fade to night, or the opposite as the lights begin to tickle them from underneath to start your day.

In the case of this particular day, it is a happy accident.  These pictures are one day, February 21, 2017.  Both the sunrise and sunset were captured.  Both were beautiful in their own right.   One brilliant light show started the day, and another closed it off.  Both were with in a few steps of each other, literally less than 100 paces apart. 

All you have to do is wait for it.  It will get here, and if you miss it... there is always tomorrow.

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