Between adjust­ing the clock back­ward and the short late fall days, the sun now sets around 4:30 p.m. The down­sides are obvi­ous: every­one feels tired and it’s hard to go back home in the dark. But on the plus side, we reg­u­larly get to see won­der­ful sunsets.

Last Sat­ur­day, sun­set came to me. After a drink in the Byward, I was cross­ing Macken­zie King Bridge to go for sushi in Chi­na­town when I noticed the tall build­ings in the down­town core were set against light pink hues. I started shoot­ing (the friend I was with was patient!) and a few min­utes later, when I turned around, the Parliament’s dark sil­hou­ette stood out against the orange and yel­low background.

On Sat­ur­day, as I was walk­ing out of the mall, I noticed the sky was turn­ing a nice shade of yel­low. I hur­ried to Par­lia­ment Hill, the clos­est van­tage point, and stood in the cold for almost 45 min­utes to cap­ture the sun­set. Noth­ing dra­matic but a nice clear sky and a beau­ti­ful gra­di­ent. A clas­si­cal win­ter sun­set, basically.

The weather is very unre­li­able these days. It changes back and forth, one sec­ond it’s hot and humid, the next one it’s cold and stormy. It’s warm when we go to bed and we wake up shiv­er­ing because the tem­per­a­ture dropped dur­ing the night. Or we snug­gled under lay­ers of blan­kets and get rid of them dur­ing the night because the tem­per­a­ture went up again. Crazy.

Since we switched to day­light sav­ing time, it’s no longer dark when I fin­ish work. I appre­ci­ate the extra day­time, and I love the warmer temperature.

The only down­side is that it’s not as easy to catch sun­sets down­town any­more! I can no longer carry my cam­era with me and pop on Par­lia­ment Hill to shoot nice river sun­sets after work. Or I have to wait until 7:30 pm… and frankly, after a long day at work, I just want to go home.

One of the good sides of Fall and Win­ter is the amaz­ing skies, cloud pat­terns and sun­sets we are hav­ing. I’m not sure why the sky is so inter­est­ing at this time of the year, but I noticed it is def­i­nitely dif­fer­ent com­pared to the summer.

I was down­town, shop­ping around, when sud­denly I real­ized the sun was about to set (at 4:30 pm, stu­pid Win­ter time!). I rushed to Par­lia­ment Hill to catch a glimpse of it and I spend over an hour there, watch­ing the amaz­ing col­ors as the sun set on the city. It was just magic.

Sun­sets and clouds… the magic of Cana­dian skies!