There is something that I think about a lot. It is something that is a large aspect of life here in the Pacific Northwest, especially now that I live in the Emerald City (a name that I have come to believe is less from the pretty glass buildings or the pretty blue-green water of the sound but from the trees and mold that grow everywhere due to the incessant moisture that infultrates every aspect of life here). This thing that I think about is the cloud.
Now this may seem odd, but the truth is that clouds are a part of nature that has always fascinated me. Once I moved out of the Mormon filled desert climes of Salt Lake City to the Wet Northwest, a place that is studied becasue of its various cloud formations and types and simply becasue of the sheer numbers of cloudy days that we have here (last year 83% of the days were categorized as cloudy of some sort), I have been fascinated by clouds; this to the point of my mom always insisting that I be a meteoroligist.
Think about it this way. When pressure, moisture and temperature all get together and combine their forces in the correct fashion, the water in the air condenses around whatever happens to be in the air, be it dust, sulfur, or whatever. This causes clouds and, when they get heavy enough, rain. That is the scientific part.
The part that blows my mind is the fact that there are literally swimming pools suspended in the air over our heads. The average fluffy cloud in the air weighs over 50 tons. That is a tractor-trailer of water floating lazily above your gazebo.
Now for those of you who are prone to panic about the slightest natural phenomena, this does not mean that at some point those swimming pools are going to decide to not be suspended anymore and come crashing down upon our heads, flattening our cars, houses, trees and farmyard animals into a liquid paste, fit only to run off into the oceans and join the ranks of glop that we already flush down our drains.
This post is pointless. I’m just looking out the window seeing these ponds floating around out there and marveling that somethig so heavy, so laden with water could be suspended over the city without crushing the things below them.
