You live in a cloud. Give three tips for how not to fall off.
But before we delve into today’s assignment a word of advice from the Rolling Stones
You tell ’em Mick!
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When I first moved to California from Northern New Jersey I was amazed at the amount of sky that you saw on a daily basis, due to an abundance of open spaces. The trees seemed, I don’t know, shorter and so you were cognizant of the sky and quite a bit more sun, which took a bit of getting used to (I don’t leave the house without sunglasses now). And the clouds were unreal, even when there wasn’t a major rainstorm rolling in from the Pacific. They have substance and form and make the game of finding familiar forms and shapes in the fluffy occupants of the skies extremely fun!
Like most kids with overactive imaginations, I had no problem imagining all sorts of individuals, from the heavenly hosts to the Greek gods, existing in the clouds above my head. The pearly gates surely rested on a bed of stratocumulus clouds with St. Peter having to playfully brush away the occasional wisp of cirrus formation that tried to cling to his beard. So I drawing on that childhood imagination, I can easily visualize floating about the stratosphere on a cloud transport.
So if I was to live in on a cloud here is my advice on not falling off
- Choose your clouds wisely! You want a nice fat Cumulus cloud with decent substance and room for growth throughout the day. Do not be fooled by a Cumulonimbus cloud! These produce thunderstorms and hail. They also tend to race across the sky, which makes staying on them rather challenging.
- Be aware of your surroundings! While birds may not be an issue, planes are! Watch out for the air traffic which can suddenly burst through or near your cloud. Be sure to have your air flight app on at all times to guide your cloud around flight traffic to avoid unnecessary accidents that cause you to fall off your cloud. But do remember to be polite and do wave at passengers as they pass by your cloud.
- Cloud maintenance is a must. Make sure you take advantage of diurnal convection once or twice a month to add moisture and substance back to your cloud. Your Cumulus needs to be fat and fluffy to hold you up, no one ever road on a Cirrocumulus for long!
And big thanks goes out to the National Weather Service page on this one for reminding me everything I learned in grade school science class about clouds, but forgot when I had to fill my brain with such things as all the lyrics to the Brady Bunch show theme song.
skullwoman 