Winter wonderland

Good Morning, Franklin! Cold, foggy start to the day here in the southernmost reaches of Auckland. This is winter -- certainly much better than where I grew up! #auckland #winter #lifeinnz

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jun 11, 2017 at 1:55pm PDT

Winter days in Auckland can be some of the best of the year: Clear, sunny days with brilliant light and fresh air. But skies don’t have to be cloudless to be brilliant: Clouds can also be brilliant. But good weather or bad, Auckland’s winter is always better than what I experienced in my native Illinois, and that’s a good thing all on its own.

Early this morning, it was a bit cold, with fog. But unlike the pervasive fog we can get in winter, it was more like a cloud had come in for a landing, lying close to the ground.

As the sun rose, the fog lifted, but it made it a prettier day. I took the photo above from our deck mainly because I thought the clouds and shadows were nice. But it was actually my second photo of the morning.

I took the photo below first, after I’d looked out and saw drops on the clothesline in the light of the rising sun. I thought it was pretty and decided to go take a photo. I then looked over, saw the scene in the photo above, and went up onto the deck to take that photo. I decided it was a better photo for Instagram, and that’s why I posted it instead.

A nice start to the day, sure, but the real story behind this photo is that it was all actually at the end of my day.

I’d been up all night working, finishing around 7am this morning. That’s something that doesn’t happen very often fortunately—I’m not as able to cope with all-nighters as I could when I was half my age—but this month it did happen, and I survived. I needed to stay up a little longer to take my medication, so I was awake (and, apparently, aware enough) to take these photos.

Photo opportunities aside, the best thing from my perspective is that our winter mornings don’t have snow, rarely have frosts (and not severe ones when they do happen), and never get anywhere near as cold as I experienced in Illinois. That probably makes it easier for me to appreciate the beauty of Auckland’s winter days, whether subtle or obvious. These days I’m also likely to have my phone—and its camera—with me.

That’s the story of how these photos came to be, and also of what a nice winter morning we had today—what I saw of it.