An afternoon of relative quiet, except for a burst of hail that lasted only a few moments. The usual chase with Charlie while watching the declining sun and changing of the light. And we saw a fragment of what must be one of the all-time dimmest (see if you can find it) rainbows ever.
It has come to my attention that not everything on this site is obvious to all viewers.
When thumbnail-size images appear in an array across a page — like in the case of the previous post — most folks perhaps know that, if a “pointy-finger hand” icon appears in place of your normal mouse pointer arrow or whatever it may be, you can click on that thumbnail image and see a larger view. But what most may not know is that you can click again on the larger image that pops up to automatically toggle on and off horizontal bars above and below the large image. When the bars are toggled on, you can view the file name or title (if one exists) in the top bar, while the bottom bar presents an “x” to collapse the view and get back to the original page along with left-and right-facing arrows on the right side of the bottom bar to navigate through the entire “gallery”.
Took off this morning to see my body shop friend, amid cloudy skies, quickly alternating from overcast to bright sun and everywhere in between in typical Oregon spring fashion. The first distraction was seeing that I needed to rapidly drive to the other side of town to get some views of the local mountains if I was to capture the highly variable cloud and lighting conditions that give context.
(Some background: Mt. Emily has been the area’s most overused visual cliche, and despite my protests, many of my web design clients insist on using its image on their sites. So I have somewhat capitulated, and have been building an archive of Mt. Emily photographs for such purposes that hopefully at least improve a bit on the usual blandness of what is typically submitted to me.)
The roiling skies had mostly calmed down by the time I found a vantage point, but I gave it a whirl anyway.
Then, on the way back across town, I spotted a new offering at one of the local car dealers, a mid-2000s Porsche Boxster. I immediately braked, parked and set to documenting this relative rarity (for this neighborhood), as it happens to be one of my favorite P-car models. The upshot is that a salesman — a fellow grayhair and, as it turns out, a fast car enthusiast — invited me to take it for a drive. He rode shotgun, and I learned that he is a classic/hot rod enthusiast who shows his cars around the region. In fact, we later stepped to his computer where he showed me his very fine 350-engined ’34 Ford pickup. The test drive lasted nearly an hour, and involved several twisty on-ramps, a freeway sprint to the Ladd Canyon pass, and romps through uninhabited in-progress housing developments. Thinking better of it at the very last moment, not wanting to trigger heart failure in my beloved spouse as I came into the driveway, I ended up declining the salesman’s offer to take it home for twenty-fours for rigorous testing and inspection.
Here’s the trailer from an upcoming documentary about the previously-unseen work of some Detroit designers who worked in the 1946 – 73 heyday of futuristic car design: