Experiments in Woolgathering

I had a meeting in NYC today, and since hotels are so wicked expensive I just did a day trip. Of course that meant I had to get up before 4 am to get ready and catch a 5:45am flight.

The nice thing about flights this early is that they’re usually very light and you can catch the sunrise from thirty thousand feet.

Sunrise this trip was spectacular. We were flying between two layers of clouds, and occasionally through a few clouds that were wandering around inbetween the layers. As dawn began we passed through a particularly dense set of clouds. Through my window I could see an horizontal smudge of orange, and as we passed out of the cloud the smudge brightened and widened. Once through the smudge became a sort of window framed by the cloud layers above and below and some other clouds to the left and right. It deepened into red on its edges and as sunrise neared the inner edges tended more and more toward yellow.

The inner clear area was almost green because of the mixing of yellow with the blue of the sky. Through the lower layer of cloud you could glimpse the disk of the sun which was a reddish orange. We started descending and the lost site of the sun, but regained our view of the actual horizon. Now we got to see the sun rise over an unobstructed horizon. As it crested the horizon the area near it was etched in bright yellow. The etching spread visibly and then finally the stab of light came as the edge of the sun came into vew.

It was a thing of rare beauty; the timing of the plane’s route and the cloud cover was really amazing now that I think about it more. It’s probably something I’ll never see again, though I’ll certainly remember it!

I’m not sure how many posts this is going to end up being, but certainly more than one, hence the numbering.

As most of you know I went to the UK for work the 2nd weekish of September. Because it’s much cheaper to fly to Iceland from there, and because my friend Ester lives there, and because I have a mild obsession with Iceland, I added a couple extra days and took a side trip there as well. This post covers the trip up to my departure from Iceland.

Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games is a thin book that is at once so obvious and so profound I could barely believe it when I read it.

Another in a string of work trips starts tomorrow. Normally I wouldn’t bother with a post just about one. This trip is a bit different though – I’m going to the UK.

Aside from a trip to Hawaii when I was in grad school this is my first trip outside of North America. It’s also my first international trip I needed a passport for – one isn’t needed to get into Canada or Mexico, both of which I’ve visited.

More exciting than the trip to the UK is my side trip to Iceland, with which, as most who know me know, I’m mildly obsessed. Plus, while there I’ll get to visit my friend Ester who seems to have the whole weekend planned out as near as I can tell.

I leave tomorrow evening for Newark, NJ. From there I catch a British Airways flight to London Heathrow. I take a shuttle to Standwick Airport, hang out for a couple hours and then take an Iceland Express flight to Reykjavík, well, Keflavík technically. Then I pass out for a while, wake up, spend the weekend in Iceland, and then head back to London Monday morning.

A week in London, not sure what I’ll do the weekend I’m there, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.