"Fade Into You"

Today is our first overcast day in Pond Inlet. When I got up this morning, the light outside was particularly spectacular: the iceberg was illuminated by the morning sunlight, while gloom and shadow clung to the rest of the landscape.

The mountains were carved out of sunshine and snow and, in the distance, low and impenetrable cloud cover rolled in, gobbling up the familiar jut of the rock and snow of Bylot Island.

Creeping darkness.

And then, for awhile, everything was bathed in a white dimness as the mountains disappeared. Here are pictures of the creeping clouds (without editing, so you can get a sense of the thick gloom they brought with them).

It has stayed remarkably bright, however, even with the thick, if fickle, cover of cloud. And, since I've needed all day to do my planning, it worked out well. As Dave and Pat noted, with cloud cover often comes warmer weather, and we are into the 20s today -- by which I mean the -20s, but it's remarkable how much of a difference we feel between -30 and -28, even if at least half of that difference is psychological.

But, with a day of planning behind me, I feel even more like I'm settling into the routine of teaching here. Plotting out classes and texts, class activities and assessments, makes the teaching part more concrete, and that is a wonderful and familiar feeling indeed.

A song for a cloudy Sunday in the Arctic: