More About Sunrises

I know I already did a post about sunrises, but you are just going to have to deal with it!

Dawn

I think that it counts as a color right??

Well anyway this is about the sunrise that I see pretty much every day of the week.  To be exact I have seen it about 111 of these sunrises in the past year (only seventy left to go!).

Why am I getting up so early, you might ask? Well there is this thing called high school, you may have heard of it. It is this place where your parents send you around age 14 to get your brain stuffed, while you sit, helpless, in a chair for hours on end. They require you to get up at ungodly hours of the morning to go there, so hence the sunrises. 

For me there is a lot of work that leads up to the actual sunrise viewing.

My usual morning routine goes somewhat like this.

1) Six-o-clock AM alarm wakes Sabine up

2) Sabine gets out of bed (Jk that is a lie, I fall back asleep till my mom comes and yells at me)

3) Around 6:10 Sabine gets up and eats breakfast

4) 6:20 Sabine gets dressed

5) 6:30-6:40 Sabine brushes her teeth

6) 6:43-6:46 Sabine is rushing to get her stuff together because she is going to be late for the bus

7) 6:49-6:53 Sabine gets on the bus

8) Sabine sees sunrise on way to school (this is the part you have been waiting for right??)

9) Gets to school anywhere from 7:05 to 7:20 (depending the bus driver, we have subs because something happened to our bus driver at the beginning of the year)

The arrow is pointing to the highway where I view sunrises from.
Photo courtesy of Deer Valley Realty  Arrow courtesy of me

Seeing that sunrise doesn't happen until step eight of my morning plan!

I started out by wanting to do this post on one specific sunrisey color, but then I realized that I already used all of those colors (It is getting really difficult to come up with something to write about!!). I looked up some sunrise colors just to make sure I wasn't missing anything, All I could come up with was the "color" (realize that I am using this term very loosely) dawn.

When you look up "the color dawn"  and click on trusty Wikipedia nothing helpful comes up except it talks about green and blue particles, like what even are those. I am very disappointed because Wiki is my fave. So I clicked on some other site called the Color Schemer Gallery which had lots of good information for me.

Colors of Sunrise
Photo Courtesy of Color Schemer Gallery

Apparently the color of sunrises vary between pink and yellow and including orange in between. This creates the unique colors that all dawns and sunrises offer.

Actually my previous statement about Wikipedia was a lie. There was some helpful information on there. 

The colors that you see at sunrise are the same ones that you see at sunset. But according to Wiki at sunset the colors are brighter because there are more particles in night air than in morning air.

Well that is all, wish me luck getting through the mere seventy sunrises I have left to see this school year.

Hey the Rain is Gone!

Good news! The rain and ickiness are gone! That means that the skies are all clear.
This post is about


Clear

(That was the closest that I could get to a clear font that was readable.)


IS CLEAR A COLOR??????   When I was little there was a girl in my preschool class who told everyone that her favorite color was clear. At the time we thought, and told her, that clear wasn't a color. In our 4 year-old world, color was something you could see and we could never see clear when we colored our drawings or painted our pictures. Clear wasn't in our clothes or shoes or bags and lunch boxes.  Although you could paint your nails clear, none of us ever did because what was the fun

Time has passed and I have begun to rethink those days of disbelief. Now that I am thinking about it I have decided that clear is in fact a color, and a lovely one too.

Clear is brilliant in that it allows us to see other colors, clearly. For example, now that the sky is clear and doesn't have any clouds I can see the blue as far in any direction as I want to. After it rains, with all of the clear water in the air and a little sunlight, we can see rainbows.  Sometimes, after our windows have been washed, I can look through the clear glass and the world around looks brighter and better than it did just moments earlier. I am seeing clearly.

Seeing clear is cool, but seeing clearly it is really a state of mind, one that I desperately wish I could have. Wouldn't it be nice to have clear organized thoughts all of the time? To be able to know with certainty that you are going in the right direction? Have everything you need? Are choosing the right friends, the best classes, the most interesting books?

I definitely do not have a clear mind.

In my mind clarity is associated with inner peace which I also want to have. I want that badly enough that I actually have thought about taking up yoga or becoming a Buddhist or something. In the meantime, I have to ponder just what I do think clearly about...

The one thing that always brings me that sense of clarity is thinking about what I want to do with my life. To some people that might seem scary or stressful but I find it quite calming. I have an ideal future planned out for myself already.

I want to go college at William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA.  When I was there on a visit last Spring, I was able to clearly see myself walking the campus, enjoying the town, and feeling that the school and students were warm and welcoming.

Isn't it so picturesque?
Photo Courtesy of Daily Press

I am going to live in a really cute apartment in New York or San Francisco, with a friend, right out of college. I clearly think I will be ready for a big city after four years in a small college town. I also want to be close to a major airport ...

Dream apartment right here
Photo Courtesy of Varrell

because I am going to do health care/ community service work internationally.  The idea that I have things to offer others, to help in a way that makes their lives better is a calm, clear goal.  Of course, I hope that I am going to take all sorts of cool trips to exotic places. I want more than anything to travel the world, not as a tourist, but to really learn about cultures and experience people as they clearly are.

My single life goal
Photo Courtesy of Tumblr

Then when I get married I am going to live in an adorable beach house in Oregon, Northern California, or somewhere in New England. I want to grow old and watch my kids grow up with people that I love dearly all around me. 

I clearly have a long way to go, to get there from where I am now.  Although the path is clear, it is colorful, and full of exciting opportunities for adventure.

Sands and Sunrises

 Sand, yes that is a color


Please bear with me while I explain what I have been up to.


On Christmas Day I flew with my family to Las Vegas and we drove to Death Valley

When we left Las Vegas we had to drive for 2 hours through a desert with no sign of civilization except for some correctional facility in the Middle of Nowhere, Nevada.

Have you ever been to

Photo courtesy of MB Post

If you have then you know that it's in the middle of nothing, nowhere, surrounded by even less, but it is the color of sand... everywhere...

My footprints.. Death Valley National Park, 12/26/14

even at night...

 Mosaic Canyon., at night, 12/25/14

This post is about sand because from the moment we left the city of Las Vegas to about three hours after we left Death Valley that is all there was to see.

But it's really not that bad.  It turns out sand can be fun.  We spent a lot of time walking  in it, up it, rolling down it, and enjoying the sun rise over it.

I know it sounds kind of desolate and lonely out there but it can be gorgeous, fun, and was a really cool place to visit.

I expected the entire place to be covered in sand, it is the desert after all, however I was surprised to learn that it had more rocks and plants than sand!

We wanted to see at least some sand dunes. We decided the best time to see the dunes would be at sunrise (I don't think I agreed to this).  We trudged out of bed at 6:00 AM, in the unseasonalably and unreasonably cold morning.  Despite the early wakeup, I would recommend this to anyone.  It was incredible!

Worth it right????

I wanted to know why there weren't a lot of sand dunes. I did some research and it turns out less than one percent of the desert in Death Valley is covered in sand dunes.  There has to be a certain environment for sand dunes to form.  The recipe is sand, wind, and a place for the sand to collect.  The Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes are the most popular dunes in the park and its easy to see why.  Some of the dunes rise to about 100 feet, and they run across a wide area and seem like they go on forever, with mountains on all sides.
It turns out that there are three types of dunes in the Mesquite Dunes area, (who knew more than one existed?) which is apparently and ancient lakebed.
Crescent dunes are wide and form under winds that blow from one direction.  They also move more quickly over the desert than any other dune.  We saw many crescents, but sadly, did not actually photograph one.  They were great for sledding and rolling down.

Linear dunes are the next variety. They are straight and long sand ridges that run forever in a line.  It forms as the result of wind coming from more than one direction and can extend for miles, and  were really hard to walk on without starting mini avalanches along the way.

Crossing linear dune in Death Valley

There are also star dunes. They are sand dunes with a steep side in three or more directions off of a center point.  They grow up instead of out to the sides, and tend to be tall and on the edges of the dunes.

Since I didn't know at the time that there were more than one kind of dune I didn't know what I was looking at until afterwards, so sadly I don't know what types I saw.



When we left Death Valley, I thought my sand-colored adventures were over.  I was wrong.  A few days later, my dad and I were at a music store in Fort Bragg, California.

                           He picked up a balalaika, which is a Russian instrument. We ended up buying it and a music book to go with it. Needless to say I am obsessed and it is more my instrument now than his. (I fully intend to have learned it by the time I get home.)

My new obsession
photo courtesy of Accent Music

Happy New Year and here's to sand-colored vacations!