英语播客 A Cup of English 367 Clouds Over Quincy.

We drove home Saturday evening from a town called Moses Lake after watching baseball games all day. The boys were tired and we were quiet in the car, looking forward to being at home and out of the wind and cold. It had been a great day, with three wins all in a row. We stopped in a town called Quincy because we were starving, and didn't want to wait until we got home to eat. We ordered food in a sandwich shop, ate quickly, and then continued on our journey home. Quincy is an agricultural town, very flat for miles and miles. Farming is the life of the town which, itself, is very small indeed. Because the landscape is flat, the sky seems like a huge expanse. As I gazed out of the window sleepily, I suddenly realized that I was looking straight at the most beautiful cloud. It was enormous, and in the darkening sky it was still lit up by the last rays of sun. There were only patches of cloud around, but for some reason this cloud was huge. Streams of rain were coming from the bottom, and were easy to see. It was awesome! I snapped away with my camera, hoping to get a good shot, but doubting very much that I would. The light was changing quickly, and so was the cloud, so I took as many photos as I could, on the off chance that one of them would come out well. When I got home, I took my SD card out of my camera and put it in my laptop to download the photos. After discarding the ones that were blurry, I found that four of them had come out okay. I immediately opened up my Picasa editing program, and got to work. The first thing that needed to be done, was to crop the photos, so there would be nothing unnecessary in them. Then I used the saturation option to add color. You have to be careful with that, because it is easy to make a photo look unnatural if you use too much color. After fiddling around until I was happy, I finished off by adding more definition. And I was finished. It's breathtaking, although it pales in comparison to the real thing. I love my Picasa photo editing program. Often, a photo won't capture the grandeur of a subject; however, with the right program, you can go a long way to achieving something wonderful.

Grammar notes.

Useful expressions: all in a row, on the off chance that ..., to fiddle (around), to pale in comparison to...

1. I had three accidents all in a row today; what's going on?

2. I left the note under his front door, on the off chance that he would find and read it.

3. He fiddled around with his sculpture and really improved it. I fiddled with mine, and really messed it up.

4. That pianist is good, but he pales in comparison to that one over there who is amazing.