That's the spire of the Washington, DC Stake Center you are seeing to the right of the temple spires. As I was driving in the other day, it was just too pretty to pass up.

And as long as I was taking pictures of what it's like to approach the temple by car, I was struck by how nice it is to see the flag as you drive up to the temple. I see now that I could have pushed the exposure on this one a little brighter. Oh, well.

And this is not what it looks like when you approach the temple by car, except very very briefly. This is what it looks like if you hop out of the car and walk back to take in an appreciative look at the lovely gardens which surround the temple. Also this is what a photograph looks like if you are focused more on centering the sidewalks in your photograph than in centering the temple itself. Sigh. Better next time.

OK-- I think that's enough for now. The usual rules apply: you are welcome to use these pictures, without attribution even (but of course not with incorrect attribution), as long as you aren't particularly rude about their subject matter.

Due to overwhelming demand...

Two comments on the same thing! Well!

Here are the pictures you wanted to see. I tried to take them next to other things so that you could have a sense of scale. I felt, as I was taking them, like it looked like I was trying to make the pile of branches look big, rather than simply showing the actual size. If I'd had a person, that might have worked better. Maybe a stuffed animal, next time. (Next time a huge tree is blown apart by a passing hurricane. Hmm.)

Anyway. Here you go.

This was after two, maybe three loads had already been taken. I think it eventually took four.

That's a minivan, not a sedan, behind my lovely pile; it's not that far back; and the pile reached a couple of feet above it.

The pile basically filled the two parking spaces allotted to us in front of the townhouse. That fact (our guess is) might have had something to do with the housing association's willingness to send the chipper and truck to break it all town and take the resulting organic matter away. Two trucks-full, and they were done.

Oh. And as long as I am posting underwhelming pictures of truly impressive damage inflicted by natural disasters, here's a picture of a tree downed by the Derecho last July. The stump you see in this shot is, by my memory, at least six feet tall; the diameter of the trunk was about three feet, I believe. This was down in Alexandria (VA), where my sister Ivy lives; I kept passing it as I drove to her house and felt amazed every time. Finally one day I remembered the camera and got this photograph.