Eye of Ike

I fell asleep as I was crossing the country, and woke up at sunset. The cloud-tops below were a brilliant pink, as were the edges of the aircraft’s wings.

The plane was also bouncing around a good deal. I realized I was flying over the remains of Hurricane Ike, stretching from horizon to horizon.

And then I saw a huge gap in the clouds off to the south. No way, I thought, could the eye of the hurricane still be intact.

Sure looked like it, though. A huge gap in the storm, many miles across. Triangular rather than circular, but then you’d expect it to be rough at the edges.

It looked like the Eye of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Maybe it was just a coincidence, that a gap in the clouds formed right then.

Washington seems to be the Land of Delays. A 20-minute delay in getting my bags and a 20-minute wait for the next Metro car, all of which got me to the hotel after all nearby restaurants had closed. So I ordered a pizza, and that took ninety minutes to get to me.

The pizza sucked, but I didn’t care.