Clouding

Clouds have returned to shroud the moon, growing ever more dense as the night has passed, gradually dimming the world so that distinct objects blend together into clumps of darkness. There has been a breeze all night, too, making the pines moan. Had the trees still been winter bare, the effect would have been creepy. Spring's foliage made it merely sad. There could be rain again by this afternoon. Cool.

I found that the whole .NET thing is just a service you can sign up for. It doesn't sound particularly useful on the whole, but I need it to use this LJ archiving tool, which lets you download everything from your journal, including comments, and the resulting file is searchable. I suppose it's worth the bother of signing up for a Microsoft service in order to be able to easily get a searchable copy of my whole journal onto my hard drive.

I see that Image Shack is still functioning, offering free image hosting with hotlinking, storage for an unlimited number of files (though individual files must be no more than about 1000 KB), and fairly generous amounts of bandwidth. Internet investors must be getting optimistic again, as the number of free hosting sites is increasing. I wonder if we'll get a second dotcom bubble? That could be fun.

Evening

A splendid overcast hides the sun, and the late afternoon light is soft and shimmering gray. The mulberry tree's young leaves are like a mass of green butterflies suspended in mid flight. Then a breeze arrives and they stir, rising until they lift the twigs to which they cling, and the tree suddenly seems to be enveloped in a cloud of fluttering, waving creatures. My cat, excited by the activity, runs across the lawn and up the tree trunk, then leaps back down. A few raindrops fall, speckling the pavement, but the brief flurry soon passes and the air falls still. Evening birds begin to chirp, the light dims, the drifting clouds darken, and the flowers fade. There is no sunset.