Morning Glory Clouds

Have you ever seen a roll cloud?

A roll cloud is a weather phenomenon that is rare and requires some very strange and specific atmospheric conditions to occur.  It is also called a Morning Glory Cloud, since the occurrence is almost always in the early morning. 

Roll clouds are somewhat common in Australia on the northern coast near the Gulf of Carpentaria and can occur in multiples, such as is shown in the picture below, which was taken from an airplane.  Arial viewing in best, because the clouds can stretch for up to 600 miles and are very low to the ground, mostly under 1,000 feet above the surface. 

I had the good fortune to see a Morning Glory cloud on a morning commute between Kansas City and Omaha back in 1982. I’m certain that it was a one-in-a million chance that I happened upon it. 

The roll cloud I saw was straight and stretched completely across my field of vision from west to east.  It was only a few hundred feet above the ground and was visible from one horizon to the other. It must have been many miles in length.  I wish I could show you a picture of it, but back in the day we didn’t have digital cameras built in to cell phones and such. 

I count my sighting of a Morning Glory Cloud as one of my Bucket List goals, even though it was mere happenstance that brought it to me.  I didn’t have to go all the way to Australia to see it.  Maybe you’ll see one too.

Summary of The Year 2012

The year is drawing to a close, and Christmas is only a few days away, so this will likely be the least read edition of my columns for 2012.  Therefore, I will use the space to publish my Second Annual Newsletter. 

Judy and I celebrated our 50^th wedding anniversary on June 9^th of this year.  No, we didn’t go on a Caribbean Cruise, and we didn’t have a party thrown by our kids.  As a matter of fact, we were on the road that day on one of our several trips.  We visited a Nevada State Park called Valley of Fire and drove across the new bridge at Hoover Dam. Then we stopped for the night at Kingman, Arizona and had a nice dinner at a Mexican restaurant.

While at Valley of Fire State Park I discovered a rock formation, which I (unofficially) named Star Gazer Hill.  It was my anniversary gift to myself.  I tried to get the park rangers to recognize the name officially, but they declined.  I guess they have enough named formations in the park and didn’t need another one.  Anyway, in case you missed it in an earlier email I sent out, here is a picture of Star Gazer Hill, which has at least eight rock faces gazing skyward, maybe even more.

The ‘faces’ of Star Gazer Hill revealed

Speaking of road trips, we made several this year.  In all, we traveled through 32 of the 50 states on seven separate trips.  We didn’t visit any new ones, and there are still two states—Alaska and North Dakota—to which I’ve never been.  If you read my road trip journals you’ll know that I love to travel and to share my journeys with everyone.

On one of our road trips we stopped for the night in Omaha and visited with our former neighbors and good friends, Rob and Karen.  We hadn’t seen them in many years, and it was great to break bread together and catch up.  We’ve since then kept in touch via the email circuit.  It’s so nice to renew friendships.

We lost one member of our family this year.  Judy’s mother passed away a few weeks ago on Judy’s birthday, so it was a sad day instead of a happy one.  Otherwise, our little family is doing fine, except for some strife in one branch, but I won’t discuss that since it I personal and not my business anyway.

My grandson, Chase, went into the Army in September of last year, 2011.  After sixteen weeks of boot camp he was unable to pass the PT requirements—not because he wasn’t strong enough, but because he was too tall.  It seems that people over six feet tall have a lot of trouble doing the pushups, and he never could get to the minimum number to pass. He was released from his obligation in January with some disappointment.  He is still unemployed, unfortunately, but then, there are a lot of folks in that position these days.

The conflicts that my singing hobby caused finally came to a head a few months ago, and I’ve decided to take a sabbatical from the Garden City Chorus.  I will stay with my barbershop quartet, but with limited engagements.  The Singing Valentines will still be on the agenda, as I really enjoy that activity.

That about sums up the year for me and I hope I didn’t bore you too much in the telling.

I truly wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

Interesting Reading or Listening

I usually listen to audio books while I’m on a road trip, and my recent one to Utah, Wyoming and Montana was no exception.  I listened to two books them and one of them, titled 90 minutes in Heaven really had an impact on me.  A Baptist minister wrote it.  He had been in a horrific traffic accident that rendered him lifeless for almost two hours.

I won’t spoil the book by telling you too much about it, as I encourage you to read or listen to it yourself.  I believe you will find it as fascinating as did.

As a result of listening to the book over the course of two days, along with some further urging by others with whom I shared the experience, I have begun to re-examine my wayward life

Those of you who have read my columns over the years may recall that I’ve had some very strange experiences with death and near death.  In fact, I claim to have been dead myself on at least two occasions, possibly three.  I didn’t see that tunnel of light, see my own body below me, or experience anything like Reverend Piper did, but there were some periods of time that were totally unaccounted for and not due to unconsciousness.

I was also visited in a dream by a close friend who had died less than 48 hours before. He even conversed with me about his death, assuring me that he was “at peace.”

Okay, enough of the esoteric.  I relate it to give some substance to my present state of mind.

I probably won’t let you in on the final decision I make to either accept or reject the supposed afterlife, but I promise not to ever proselytize.  I’m no preacher anyway, and certainly not a model for others.

If you want a good read, even if only for the medical history of a person who had 34 separate operations to put him back together again, or to learn what the Ilizarov apparatus is and how it works, try 90 Minutes in Heaven.

An Ilizarov apparatus in use

Simple Autumn Pleasures

 I live outside of Augusta in a community that is adjacent to the huge Army Post, Fort Gordon.  There are two events that take place every fall and winter on the post and both are well publicized locally. 

In the fall there is a cleanup of the autumn leaf fall and the refuse is burned over a period of a few days in late October or early November. After Christmas there is another gathering of all the Christmas trees that were erected at the fort and by the military living off post.  Once again, a large controlled burn takes place.

The smoke from these two fires can be seen for miles. If you happen to live downwind from the fort you can also smell that aroma of burning leaves and trees. It brings back childhood memories for me.

It amazes me that there are literally millions of people who have never smelled the aroma of burning leaves in the fall. I don’t know when the municipal ban of leaf burning took effect, but it must have been sometime back in the “politically correct” 1970s.

For those of you city-dwellers who have never experienced this, you don’t know what you’re missing.  It was an annual fall chore to rake the fallen leaves from all the trees on our property and pile them at the curb. 

When the pile was large enough—sometimes we had to rake and build several of them—the younger set usually played a game of diving into the pile to “smoosh it down.”  Of course, that necessitated re-raking and forming the pile anew, but the fun we had was worth the extra effort.

After all the shenanigans were completed, the next thing we did was to light the pile and burn the leaves.  It was all done with adult supervision, and I don’t recall anyone setting their property or their house afire.  And since most people on the street took part in this annual activity, it was common to have several leaf piles burning simultaneously up and down the street.

The neighborhood was always aromatic with that smell of burning leaves for about a week or more during the late fall, usually right around Halloween.

If you are one of those who missed out on the fall phenomenon of leaf burning, I feel badly for you.  Unless you happen upon a forest fire, now called wildfires for some strange reason, you’ll never know what I mean when I call the smell 'aromatic'.  I cannot provide you with the odor, but here is a picture of what the activity might have looked like back in the good old days. Notice that those are kids doing the raking and burning, and they’re doing a pretty good job of it too.

 

As a footnote, that leaf raking and leaf burning activity also provided a pretty good chore that the ambitious kids could use to earn some spending money.  There were always some people who were willing to pay a teen to perform the task for them, so it was one of the chores, along with lawn mowing and snow shoveling, that we could use to augment our allowances.  It’s too bad that today’s youngsters don’t seem to have that work ethic.