Something I'm noticing.

Arizona's sunsets rock.

During my time at ASU, I had plenty of outta-staters say Arizona sunsets were unbelievably colorful and varied. A friend of the family, who lived in Minnesota, used to photograph sunsets in Phoenix and paint them in oils; she kept the photographs on hand to prove that the paintings weren't fanciful.

I've spent a total of a month in California over the past year, and the sunsets are uniformly boring. (San Francisco is the worst offender: between fog, terrain, and buildings, there rarely is a sunset.) Today's sunset was the prettiest in a while:


Still, I find myself nostalgic. My Phoenix folks will recognize this as a beautiful, but not at all unusual, Phoenix sunset:


Neither of these photos have been altered since leaving the camera — I normally increase the color brilliance in my photos, because my camera tends to record less vivid colors than the eye in a given situation.