Saturday Sequel: Both Sides Now

It’s rather surprising, and more than a little sobering, to consider how much we take some things for granted—until they are taken away, or at least stop working properly. I’ve come to depend, more than I realized, on the ready availability of the friends I’ve made with this website—most especially during this trying time of lockdown, when direct contact with loved ones and neighbors cannot be taken for granted as one of the normal pleasures of everyday life. And so I’m doubly grateful for my close followers who helped to resolve the website glitch that prevented us from enjoying our usual sharing of thoughts, comments, and friendly banter for a couple of days, and for the Happiness Engineer(s) at WordPress who helped to fix the problem. And now that things are back to normal, I feel that I’m on a cloud again. And so I’m bringing you a sequel to my cloud post from six days ago (here). This is the other lenticular cloud to which I referred, and which shares its prime spot in my experience. I saw this one in 1991 near the town of Oringi, also in New Zealand, but in the southeast part of the North Island. It lies some 20 km to the east of the L-shaped Ruahine Range of tall hills, with the long arm of the L coming down from the north and then angling off to the west. The prevailing winds were coming from the northwest, being funneled into the angle of the L, and as they traveled on, having cooled with the added height, the conditions were just right for this formation to evolve. And, as ominous as it looks, there was no indication of any storm activity. Down at my observation site, it was a calm, beautiful afternoon—which made the incredible cloud seem all the more dramatic and, yes, all the more eerie. I unfortunately did not make notes about film and metadata.