What a beautiful day outside!

Of course you may beg to differ. I do understand that it's cloudy and 60 degrees outside. That's no matter. It's a perfect cloudy. The kind where out one window things are just gray and drippy, and out the other side of the building, when you look toward the city, a thick powder-puff of gray makes the tops of the sky-scrapers dissappear.

Now Portland doesn't have too much when it comes to big high-rise office buildings. You have the Pink building, the one shaped like a stick of deordorant, the one with the Portland City Grill in it, and of course a few more. Yet, on days like today, the city feels tall and important. Scraping the sky for real, as it were. The buildings are propping up the clouds.

Not having spent a great deal of time in a high-rise building (visits, that's all), I have to wonder about how interesting it must be to watch a cloud bank like that roll in. If you're in a truly large edifice, I would imagine that you'd be engulfed in clouds quite frequently in the winter. Not to mention engulfed in storms, too! How exciting!

It's probably not quite as exciting as it might seem at first, though. It's not terribly thrilling to fly through clouds in an airplane, after all. Just dense and grey and misty hour after hour. It's also not too great when you're hiking and you're up high in a cloud. Just looks like fog. I wonder why I feel like it would be any different up in a building. If I think logically, of course I know it wouldn't be.

I think it's the constant prospect of being inside something that is strange and opaque--clouds are just clouds, but maybe if you were standing still inside one you could watch pockets of air open up or something! Gaps INSIDE a cloud mass. That would be neat. Maybe there are gremlins that will appear out of the mist and suction-up with their toothy little mouths on your office window. No one talks about these things so I must presume that they don't exist.

(adding as an edit... check out that rad link to the Cloud Appreciation Society over to the right. It's so cool. The pictures they have are incredible, and if you do check it out, read the links about the morning glory cloud. Very cool.)