Do judge a book by it's cover! And then take a peek at the book trailer Mountaineers Books just released on YouTube. Wooohooo! Order yourself a copy and look up while you wait for delivery! Check out my events page for upcoming talks/book signings in Washington D.C. and the Bellingham-Seattle-Olympia corridor!
A Sideways Look at Clouds
What a great day in Cloudville! As I pulled into my driveway this morning after grocery shopping, I noticed a suspicious looking package on my front doorstep. Suspicious because it was about the size of a book. I leapt out of my car and toward the package. Yes! An early copy of my new book, A Sideways Look at Clouds.
A Sideways Look at Clouds will be on in stores in mid- September.
You can pre-order copies now at Mountaineers Books, Powell's Books, IndieBound, Amazon Smile (0.5% goes to a charity of your choice), Barnes and Noble, Amazon
Clouds by Rail
En route by train from Bellingham, WA to Olympia not long ago, I spent the entire four hour trip in the window seat looking out the window and taking photos of the scenery and clouds and bridges along Puget Sound as we headed south.
At first I was dismayed by the window--scratched or abraded so badly that all my photos looked fuzzy.. But after looking at the results, I loved the strange opaque quality of the photographs. They look more like old-fashioned silver prints or Daguerrotypes. And the clouds look like something out of dream.
Test Your Cloud I.Q.
During our recent spate of sunny days, I've been enjoying going through my completely unorganized files of cloud photos I've taken over the past several years. Until fairly recently, I couldn't name the type of cloud in the photo--a bit of knowledge that would have helped me organize them into ten tidy folders.
Now, with lots of practice, some guess work, and some help from my meteorologist in Arizona, I am posting here a slide show of clouds for you to try your hand at identifying.
Click on the image below to advance the slides to see fourteen photos representing some of the main cloud types and some variations. Just below this slideshow, you'll find the same slides with cloud names provided. (The first name is the genus, the name in parenthesis is the species or variety).The two sets of slides are in slightly different order so as to discouraging peeking.
To refresh: The ten main cloud types: Stratus, Stratocumulus, Cumulus, Nimbostratus, Cumulonimbus, Altocumulus, Altostratus, Cirrostratus, Cirrocumulus, and Cirrus.
Remember: The slide set above is your quiz; the set below, in different order, has the answers.
This is a great sunny-day activity when you are just too tired to slather on more sunblock or have exhausted your vocabulary for describing the skies of a Pacific Northwest summer: "perfect," "clear," "azure," "stunning," "cloudless," "crystal clear," "brilliant," etc.