"Write now is good."

Found objects, sky adoption, and online writers groups

Work projects have me surfing the Interweb. Some fabulous finds I want to share with you are:

1. FOUND magazine
It's easy to spend a lot of time on this site, looking at the random finds. Its mysterious photos and cryptic notes have really sparked my imagination. I laughed hysterically at some; with others, I became pensive. The site entertained me for quite a while.

The above image is the "Find of the Day" for today. Arianna Meyer in Kansas sent in this "Shopping + Guys" note, and explains:

I found this when I was moving into my new house. Someone who lived there before probably had kids who played school. Obviously this essay received an A+.

Reader submissions are the lifeblood of FOUND magazine, so submit, already.

2. Urbis
Urbis is an online community dedicated to providing feedback on written work. Users submit their work and their "goals" for the work; other users (either "friends" or "strangers") then review the work. The site tracks the ratings and provides an analysis of what the community thinks about any given work.

According to their site:

Urbis is a community of creative people that offers sophisticated tools to help advance creativity and expose it to an audience.

If you're looking for an online writers group, Urbis could be the place.

3. Adopt the Sky
As a card-carrying member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, this site caught my eye. Readers in the U.S. now have a chance to "adopt" one square mile of sky in a symbolic effort to clean it up and help lower asthma rates. It's like the "adopt-a-highway" program, only way above our heads. The group Earthjustice, which started this project, describes what they do:

Earthjustice evens the odds in court against law-breaking industries and government agencies, protecting the environment and human health.

We do it for free. And we win...

Adopt the sky and sign the petition to tell the EPA we need better air standards now.

Cleaner air = more oxygen to the brain = more brain cells to use for writing and creative endeavors. Consider signing the petition.

Cloud appreciation: What a storm chaser sees

The site Extreme Instability is the photographic diary of a professional storm chaser.

As a proud, card-carrying member of The Cloud Appreciation Society, I marvel at what he's captured. The above image is taken from a recent series he shot of a supercell storm above Bucklin, Kansas, U.S.

The site features video and a moment-to-moment journal of his many storm-chasing experiences. This guy has gotten quite close to a multitude of tornadoes — if you've never experienced one first-hand, the site's images and stories will replicate how terrifying it is for you.

UPDATE: Mike Hollingshead of Extreme Instability is working on a book with another storm chaser. Mike states: "It should be out by mid-summer (wild guess). It's mostly just a photography book, with some text. It's through Thames and Hudson in London."

Stumbling, falling, creating

Photo: room to make her big mistakes by abhayah~

Making mistakes can be good for your creativity and productivity.

Really, I mean it — this is not an April Fool's Day joke.

Read and consider these thoughts:

You've got to have an atmosphere where people can make mistakes. If we're not making mistakes, we're not going anywhere. The scientific method is designed for mistakes. — Gordon Forward

Be involved with and completely present for problems (and the opportunities they may give you):

If you don't bring your whole self to a problem, then you're not going to be much of a problem solver, because you're not going to be giving the best parts of your mind to thinking. — Dorothy Brunson

After all, we are human, and this is a good thing. (This is my favorite quotation of the three.)

We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed. — Maya Angelou

Eventually, we're going to make mistakes, especially if we takes risks in our art and writing and blaze new trails. Why not flip their negatives and get as much positive as we can out of them when they happen?

Comet between fireworks and lightning

The Astronomy Picture of the Day site has a crystal-clear mission: "Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer."

What is happening in this picture? Click on the image to get a better view. Here's what you will see (description and all links from the APOD site):

Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning
Credit & Copyright: Antti Kemppainen
Explanation: Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught continues to move out from the Sun and dim, but should remain visible in southern skies with binoculars through the end of this month. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.

Some of the images are so stunningly beautiful that I cannot believe they are real. Others left me speechless and longing to wander our planet and surrounding stars. Check out February 8th — "Galaxies Away" or February 3rd — "Alborz Mountains in Moonlight."

Look at these whenever you need a little inspiration, a break from visual clutter and media spam, or a reminder of how vast our universe truly is. These images could also be used as writing prompts.

If you have an image that would fit with this site, NASA takes submissions!

From Found on the Web.

Fall clouds

Fall skies present prime cloudspotting opportunities. Lingering, late-summer sun combined with cool air created some great photo opps for me, also. Here are a couple of recent shots:

We took a day trip to visit a farm up north. The juxtaposition of fall foliage, barn roof and clouds captures the sunshine warmth and northern-air chill. I feel relaxed just looking at this photo.

I photographed this one through a living room window. Sunset and crisp air after a storm combine to form dramatic, complimentary sky hues.

Some serious cloud appreciation

I was reading dooce one day last week and noticed a link she posted to some interesting cloud formations. As I'm a proud member of The Cloud Appreciation Society, I clicked through immediately. This site features some spectacular sky and nature photography. And I saw photos of lenticular clouds, which I'd never seen before.

Skywatchers sometimes mistake lenticulars for UFOs because they are often perfectly round or oval. Since the clouds usually form and hover over mountain tops, groups of them look like extraterrestrial ships scouting for a large enough landing area for the entire fleet. As I viewed the images, I reflected how unlikely it would be that I'd ever see a formation like this with my own eyes. They are seen under certain conditions, but I thought the odds were against me.

File this under, "Anything's possible!" As my family and I cloudspotted after some spectacular weather yesterday, we saw lenticular clouds! And I captured them in pixels. I got three clear shots through the glass window before the lens-like forms began to lose their contrast with the surrounding clouds. Here is the clearest take; it is nowhere near as dramatic as seeing it with the naked eye, so I've drawn in a couple of arrows for emphasis:

We do not live near mountains. Another theory about "lennies" is that they are "cloud-cover" for UFOs. Interesting. The imagination takes flight...

New travel tips

1. Take photos of the sky while you are driving — if you are a passenger, that is. Try to get a few highway signs in for points of reference. You may be amazed at what you capture and how interesting the images are. (Below is somewhere along U.S. I-95 at twilight.)

2. Eat local and off-the-beaten path. Get a small consensus of recommendations from residents. And if you are in southern Maryland near the Potomac River, eat at Captain Billy's Crab House in Newburg. The crab cake sandwiches are packed with crab meat and spiced just right — incredibly satisfying. (Here is the view from the restaurant.)

3. Unplug. Ignore email (as much as you truly can). Leave the iPod behind and tune in to some local radio stations. Keep the TV off and stare out your hotel window instead or go for a hike. How about a nap? You will leave feeling like you had a genuine break from it all. You may even feel more refreshed when you return to your non-vacation life.

A big day for clouds

An extremely unusual cloud formation, so rare that it is making headline news all over the Web and beyond, has been sighted by an Australian scientific team stationed in Antarctica. And — the key here — they documented it with photos. Polar stratospheric clouds, also known as nacreous clouds, are produced only when some radical weather conditions come together:

"The clouds only occur at high polar latitudes in winter, requiring temperatures less than minus 176 degrees Fahrenheit. A weather balloon measured temperatures at minus 189 degrees Fahrenheit on the day the photos were taken.

"Resembling airborne mother-of-pearl shells, the clouds are produced when fading light at sunset passes through water-ice crystals blown along a strong jet of stratospheric air more than six miles above the ground."

Read the complete article and see the news-making nacreous cloud photos here. For those of you who need to see one immediately, here is a nacreous cloud photo from Wikipedia's entry about them, courtesy of NASA (which generously releases all of its photos into the public domain unless otherwise noted):



As some of you may know already from reading my blog, I'm a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. In my neck of the woods, not quite the Antarctic, we've been suffering from a record heat wave. Early this evening, it rained, bringing the first semi-cool temperatures the region has felt after some brutal days. Amazing clouds formed after the brief shower. Here's what I captured:



Give me a fluffy white monster on a crisp, robin's-egg-blue backdrop any day. We've been seeing nothing but pinkish-gray haze for what seems like forever. I am now one cooler, much happier cloudspotter.