Summer storms

For years now Sam's been yammering on about the various light effects produced by his polarized sunglasses. But as he's sort of made understanding light into his life's work, I suppose it's to be expected from him. Then we studied polarized light as part of school last year, and that was really interesting. And then, recently I got some polarized sunglasses of my own, and suddenly I, too, am driving down the street exclaiming, "Oh! The clouds! The blue sky! The green trees! Everything is so beautiful!"

In fact, it probably gives me a somewhat mistaken idea of how beautiful everything is (I was driving along the Mountain View Highway, which is out in the middle of dry grass and nowhere, and saying to myself, "I never knew it was so lovely out here!"—when I chanced to peer over my sunglasses and see how perfectly ordinary and desert-like it all looked) and then, to make matters worse, these pictures are NOT taken using my polarizing filter on the camera, so you probably won't even fully see what I thought was so great about these clouds.

But anyway. They were great. So here they are.

That striated, uplifted part on top is my favorite.

You can see it closer here. It looks so dynamic! Like a column of ash from a volcano or something.

I love it when the clouds start gathering all around the bowl of the horizon like this, and every moment you can see them building themselves up, bigger and bigger. I always get excited and hope there's going to be a thunderstorm…er, except when my son is off on a Boy Scout campout of course. (All these clouds and rainstorms I so enjoyed meant it rained on Abe every day of his campout last week. Sorry, Abe!)

One of these cloud-groups was high enough, and passed over so fast, that by the time the raindrops reached us, the sun was already out again! It was cool to see the rain pouring down from a sunny sky!