Happy Sunday!
My friend Terri Webster Schrandt chose gray as her May color for Sunday Stills.
Online Miriam Webster is not too kind about gray. She calls it, “dull, uninteresting, dismal, gloomy, neutral color, age, silvery, and slate” just to quote a few of her definitions and synonyms. But gray is not all bad.
Pilou Asbae
Life is not black and white; there is some gray nuance to it.
We just returned from a whirlwind vacation to visit several friends in Woodlake, CA. We timed it so we could see some of our Kiwanis friends off to their new adventure moving from Woodlake, California to Oregon. We broke the ten hour drive to California by spending a couple of days in Las Vegas. At first blush, you can’t find a lot of gray in Las Vegas. But if you can’t find it you can make it.
Las Vegas Grays
Most birds are shy when you walk up to them. Not these beauties strutting their Las Vegas stuff on the slate-gray sidewalk outside of the Aria. The black bird chose the contrasting gray tiles to accent her feathers, while the two gray birds chose the softer brown.
California Grays
Cars
Early Saturday morning we all got up and drove to the big Visalia Car Show on Main Street. Since I just did a series on the Prescott Car Show, I’m not going to bore you with a hundred more car photos, but this gray and salmon Desoto stood out among the others. It even enjoyed a privileged parking spot on the corner where you couldn’t miss it.
Windmills
A week ago after reading her post on windmills, I promised Restless Jo I would take a picture of some windmills in Dutch Colony, a rural neighborhood north of Woodlake, California. It took just a second as we drove from one appointment to another to stop at this house where this family had a substantial collection of gray windmills.
Under clear blue skies, the temperature was a pleasant 80 degrees without much of a breeze. None of the windmills turned as I took their pictures. I loved the old platform on wheels but in the twenty years we lived there, I didn’t document any movement. They were more like windmill statues.
As we drove home from California, I took these pictures on Highway 58 going through the Tehachapi Mountain Range east of Bakersfield, California. As the temperature dropped, the wind picked up, the sky got misty and changed from blue to gray. The higher we climbed, we almost felt like we were in the clouds.
According to a 2019 article by Clean Tech Alliance, the small town of Tehachapi is a hub for the wind industry and attracted Amazon to open three wind farm projects. All counted there were estimated to be over 4,700 turbines. That translated to 3,200 megawatts of electricity. A megawatt is 1 million watts. To put that into perspective, “one megawatt of energy generated could furnish power to approximately 2,941,176 homes per second.” (Solar Reviews.com)
The wind industry started in the 1980s. These wind machine blades powerfully turned the wind into electricity. It looks like they had babies. The little wind machines are not smaller because of distance, there really is a group of pint-sized machines laboring right next to their adult counterparts. The shorter ones may be earlier machines. I couldn’t find too much information on them in the short time I had to prepare this article.
It was kind of eerie at first being in the clouds, but soon the sky cleared. We stopped for a doughnut in Tehachapi for breakfast. The wind was not kind to my hair, but you can see that the wind blew hard enough that the blue skies started to peek out. As we drove into the sunlight, we saw some of the larger blades lying on the ground, probably at the factory. I estimated one of them to be about the same length as a semi.
Andre Gide
The color of truth is gray.
The truth is that these gray skies light up the world and gray is not dull at all, but electrifying. 🙂
Coming Up This Week
- One more week to add your comments to the May Story Chat, “Nailing It” by Anne Stormont.
- Writer’s Quotes Wednesdays – This week beauty, coming up – healing.
- A New Challenge Host Interview with Sandy and Amanda from Friendly Friday Photo Challenge.
Marsha Ingrao - Always Write 
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