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Chasing rainbows

No, that's not what I've been doing for the last month, but it is what I've been doing for the past hour. We had a couple shallow waves of thunderstorms with declining sunshine in between.

The first rainbows hit when I was leaving the supermarket. I stood for a while beneath the not quite shelter of the open back hatch of the stationwagon and stared at the perfect double rainbow, which from where I was standing appeared to end at Target. (Pot o' gold? Maybe if I owned some Target stock …) One nice thing about the huge strip mall of big box stores, nothing obstructing the sky.

And, of course, me without my camera. The woman who stopped to admire the rainbow with me was also camera-less. One doesn't expect to see the glories of nature at Potomac Yard, unless your idea of nature is stucco and asphalt.

After watching the rainbow fade and intensify, fade and intensify, I decided to head on home and put away my groceries. Naturally the rainbows got super intense as soon as I was out on Route 1. I managed to not rear end anybody between the mall and my house and the rainbow managed to not fade away.

After I got the groceries put away, I grabbed my camera and an umbrella and headed down to Simpson Park. The rainbow obligingly perked up and decorated the sky quite nicely.

I was three blocks from home before I started wailing to myself that I hadn't slapped the fisheye on the camera. The 20 mm lens is just not quite wide enough for rainbows. (Chalk that one up to experience. Next time I'll know.) But the rainbow went ahead and arched prettily over the houses along the way. As soon as the view opened up, it indicated pots of gold in the playground, pots of gold in the gardens, pots of gold beyond the baseball field (locked, dammit, or the baseball diamond would have been a hell of a place to shoot from), and pots of gold over in Old Town Alexandria, which if you own real estate there is probably pretty accurate.

How did the pictures come out?

I don't know yet. My elderly iBook is too old and slow to handle photos anymore, so I shall just have to stew along, all unknowing, until I get back to Richmond (and my much newer and faster PC) to check out the files.