A little while back I was looking for just the right cloud. I had the idea that I wanted the tag for this site (the one that appears in the tab when this site is open) to be a glass full of sky. It would just look like a glass full of something blue unless there were a cloud in it, so I needed to find one.
I had to wait for the better part of a week, past the perfectly clear days and the overcast days, and then past the streaky-grey days and a much-too-wide-and-amorphously-cloudy day, too. Last weekend we got to a fluffy, cotton-ball cloud day, and I found this one:
On the same day I joined friend on a trip to Palm Springs. Even after I'd found the cloud I wanted, the awareness of the shapes the of clouds lingered.
"There's a good one!" Benton said, over and over, as we drove out to the desert.
What makes a cloud good? It had to fit the standards I was looking for that day - but of course, the clouds don't care.
If my understanding of earth science holds up, we were both much more interested in the shapes of the clouds than they clouds were themselves. It was the awareness of what was around us, looking at it in a different way - setting ourselves the task of looking for a cloud that would be handsome in a glass - that made it a worthwhile experience.
I spent most of the next day learning to use a program called GIMP to edit Perry into a picture I took of a glass of water. Took quite a bit of learning.
In the end, the glass was too small to recognize up in the tab bar on my browser, so I just added the initials IH to the background I was already using.
Having results is nice, but it's in the doing that the fun is.