Wet Rock
There is no smell in the world quite so wonderful to me as wet stone. Waking up to a grey day is intensely invigorating.
There is no smell in the world quite so wonderful to me as wet stone. Waking up to a grey day is intensely invigorating.
So, I went to another board game party with coworkers, this time at Aaron’s. It was great fun, there was Settlers, beer, guitar, geeking out. The best bit came, however, at the end: it was THUNDERING by the time we all left, so Theban drove all of us as far as he could manage (except for Vesa, the Finn, who decided this was fine weather to bike home in). This left me at the Boulder Transit Center, a few blocks from my house. I had thought, for some reason, to bring an umbrella, and it was definitely a good idea. This rain is torrential, and I had a bag of games to keep dry! But the weather lifted my spirits like nothing else I could imagine, and I started belting out Bold Riley as I walked. A girl walking a bit ahead of me noticed, turned, smiled, so I commented that “you have no idea how much I’ve missed weather like this.” Her rejoinder: “I’ve been in Cairo for a year. I do!” It was lovely, to sing in the rain, and, I must admit, frolic a bit. Puddles may have been splashed in.
The thunder out here is spectacular. When I was in Hakodate, I saw the most amazing fireworks of my life. Part of that was just that the Japanese know their fireworks, but part of it was that it was a sonic display as much as visual: the sound was designed to have some impressive deep notes and booms, and best of all, echo off of the mountain at the end of the peninsula. Here, the thunder—already impressive—has a whole mountain, and particularly good sounding boards like the Flatirons, to echo off of. You get it all twice, at least.
I love the weather here; the snow has been coming down all day, and it’s magical outside. I could deal with a lovely long winter, I think; though this has had days like hiking in a t-shirt on my birthday (January 19) and an interlude in Africa…
Speaking of which, I hope people have liked the pictures. I have little more to say about the trip, despite having given a slideshow of it to my coworkers today. It’s more a collection of little observations than a narrative. However, one observation I’ve consistently forgotten to mention, and which I want to not forget, is the practice of the people who walk along the street selling things: they make a sort of kissing noise, or rattle a bunch of coins together in their hands, both in a distinctive fashion that’s hard to convey in words. That’s half of it; the other thing they do is speak in a way that my inner phonetician would love to study, when hawking their wares—it’s with a constricted vocal tract, particularly the larynx, it sounds like, and at a lower pitch than normal speech.
Wow, what a way to wake up. Zero to sixty, as it were. A guaranteed way to have me feel awake on the greyest of days is to have snow, snow and more snow coming down.