From Contracts to Clouds

I managed to close out April this year without too much mishap: fingers, toes, sanity, and soul intact. My firstborn survived her last prom and is on track to graduate highschool, nextborn learning to drive safely in blessed defiance of his ADHD. Me: founded a corporation, steadily making new connections, friends, laying down new dreamlines for this year and beyond.

Mobile phone contracts: I dropped my previous carrier completely at the end of the month. Agreeing to a new contract somehow always feels like making a pact with the devil (in my case a very customer-oriented representative named Karen from Verizon). Appropriately the transaction even happened to coincide with Walpurgisnacht. Luckily my family comes from very hearty stock: our souls eventually regenerate just like our livers. Thank God for that.

Do you believe that there's always something interesting and positive to learn from every interaction? Fifteen minutes of surfing and reading, mind skipping like a stone across the surface of the Web, and I managed to learn something and have material for a short article.

   Contracts → Walpurgisnacht → Goethe's Faust → The Brocken → ...


Brocken Spectres/Bows and Glories are a mysterious and colorful type of outdoor optical illusion that few people have witnessed. These spectacular oddities appear when location, light, luck, atmospheric conditions, angles, and the observer collide in proper proportion. Where? They appear on mountainsides, from airplanes, ships, in fogs, mists, even in the spray of waterfalls. Records exist in mythology, literature, and modern photography. The first account of the Spectre proports a startled climber falling from the Brocken to his death--but don't let that influence you to stay at home. You'll be luckier. I promise.

As someone who has been hiking mountains lately, often in a mixture of weather conditions, I'm hopeful of eventually encountering more of Nature's unique special effects--maybe even snapping a few good pictures. If you've ever wanted to be larger than life (spectre), bath in a sphere of colorful light (bow), or witness a real halo (glory), get out there and head to higher ground.

Don't want to go to the trouble of venturing to places where you can observe such curious and elusive atmospheric effects as Brocken Bows/Spectres and Glories? You could simply appreciate clouds. The important thing is to get outdoors, open your eyes, explore, and enjoy.