Category Archives: Sunsets

One small but non-trivial change in moving to the High Desert in general and to this house in particular is our morning wakeup routine. Our bedroom windows face east and we’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the plantation shutters open, so the Sun is shining in about 6:00 AM.

The iPhone can’t even come close to recording the pink and orange hues that greeted me this morning. Imagine the saturation and warmth turned up to 11! The Sun was still just below the horizon, but the sky made it look like we were inside of a ginormous neon tube. With the shutters, pergola, bird feeders, and high-tension power line towers in the distance all silhouetted against the glow, it was fantastic.

It makes it tough to sleep in, but we’re adjusting – and views like this make it worth it.

We went to try to solve our phone problem today – we’re all on AT&T and their coverage in this area sucks. So we’re going to switch carriers.

Sundown was nice, lots of contrails and “mare’s tail” clouds.

Gorgeous!

Another change for the Forever Home from all of my previous houses is that we don’t have an individual mailbox at the street next to the driveway – there’s a set of mailboxes for the entire tract down on the corner. Since we’ve been in here almost three weeks now (WOW!) I figured I should probably see if we had any mail.

We did! A couple of very nice “Happy New House!” cards from some friends, lots of escrow closing and insurance documents, and a slew of “Dear New Homeowner” spam. (Which went straight into recycling – life’s too short!)

Since it got up to 102ºF here today (it’s a dry heat, really, not that uncomfortable) I went about a half hour after sunset when it was comfortable. With some smoke still in the area from a couple of brush fires, it was lovely.

Not saying that a few clouds couldn’t push this sort of lighting from “astonishing” up a notch or two to “extraordinary,” but I’m thinking I can get used to it as a baseline without ever taking it for granted.

Just after sunset, “the Golden Hour,” is photogenic up here in the desert.

Part of it’s the light, part of it’s the mountains, part of it’s the various layers of smoke from the Gold Fire over by Big Bear. Part of it is the Belt of Venus and part of it’s the 88% illuminated Moon floating up there.

In the end, we’ve come full circle. There were several things that got us pointed at the High Desert as a location for the Forever Home, but one of them was the Virtual Railfan camera here in Hesperia.

(Image: Virtual Railfan)

See those mountains in the near distance on the right?

Here’s how they look from our back yard. Which isn’t a surprise since we’re less than a mile away. I’m looking forward to seeing snow on them in a few months. We may be in the desert, but we’re also at 4,000 feet elevation.