Ahh.  Sunshine.  I guess it’s true that absence makes the heart go fonder.  After so many days of rain, the sudden appearance of the sun was almost shocking.  It started Thursday evening around sunset.  A break in the clouds allowed the sun to poke through.  The bank of clouds on their way out of town traveled quickly across the sky as the sun sank toward the horizon.

I can’t remember the last time I was so glad to see the sun, even if it was calling it a night.

Black and White Version

This created something of a photographic challenge.  The clouds were dark and moving fast.  The great dilemma between getting enough depth of field to shoot the whole scene and needing a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the clouds.  The only way to achieve this is with a very high ISO setting.  That means some noise I’d rather not have.

Much like life, photography is an attempt to balance alternatives to get the best possible result since you can’t get exactly what you want.

But the glimpse of the sun made up for it.  It reminded me 2 lines from a poem a friend recently shared on Facebook:

I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.

I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.

I started appreciating the sun more about 4 days in–the next 10 days of rain were overkill.  However, after a 2 week separation, I was about as grateful as it gets for sunshine.

Setting Sun in color

I wonder if Tisen feels this way when I’m gone?  He seems just as excited when I return after taking 5 minutes to check the mail as when I’ve been gone for over an hour.  But when I’m gone for days, he goes absolutely nuts.  It’s like he’d given up hope and my sudden reappearance throws him into an uncontrolled frenzy.

I wonder how dogs keep track of time?  Tisen seems to keep a regular schedule during office hours.  He gets up once I’ve made my coffee.  He’s like clockwork about noon when he decides it’s time for his mid-day walk.  And he never fails to start pestering me to walk and feed him at the end of the day, although sometimes he gets started a little early.

But when it comes to the last walk of the day, he doesn’t seem to notice at all.  He’s content to lay on the sofa with us until well past his bedtime.  Conversely, if I walk into the bedroom, he goes to bed.  He does this with no regard to the time of day.

On weekends he doesn’t seem to have any sense of time at all.  He will sleep in later than I can on some Saturdays.  It’s almost as if he doesn’t believe I’m up and making coffee if he didn’t hear an alarm go off first.

Ah well, maybe that’s why a dog’s years are so much longer–they lose track of time.

Fading light