August 2nd

We report: we do let our eyes get used to the darkness for half an hour, and we remember to only use red lights. We do it the right way, but the moon is bright behind the trees, the sky is still full of smoke, and so it turns out that the crickets are much louder than the stars.

August 1st

We report: the whole sky is rising all at once, all the clouds suddenly competing for height. We did not perceive whatever changed in the atmosphere to make this happen, but the flies are nervous, the dogs are barking, and the birds are flying low. We wonder where the ceiling is.

July 31st

We report: once a large, single cloud, we have watched the steam get carved out into fine lace. These new clouds are as much about the emptiness they are wrapped around as the steam itself. In time, the bits of clouds keep getting smaller until we cannot point them out anymore.

July 30th

We report: the sun is flattening itself against the horizon as best as it can. The shock of red is hypnotising us, keeping us rooted to the ground while we watch it go down. It grows redder and redder as it sinks into the earth, even when only a few embers remain.

July 29th

We report right at the end of sunset, almost exactly missing the sun. Rising in its stead in the belt of Venus, the moon slowly goes from pink to orange. As we try to keep up with it, bats fly by our face, always narrowly missing it. The heat of the day is not leaving.

July 28th

We report: we start heading into the evening with the clouds, and the light behind the haze is becoming greyer before it can turn blue. Some other day, some other year, this could be rain, but it is not so easy today - even though we cannot help but look for it.

July 27th

We report: it is easy, with the clouds laid out like this, to think of the sky as this geological time scale; see this Precambrian altocumulus pushed up by the neighbouring volcanic activity. See the cirrocumulus shale pushed up against the salt dome, unable to ride further.

July 26th

We report: we had a busy, fast day, until we sat down here below the sky. Though it is somewhat windy, the clouds seem to be moving at their slowest, and within minutes we found our breathing trying to match the same pace. The sun is quietly setting at the other end of the sky.

July 25th

We report: we can feel the land breeze blowing against our back, and still no stars. At this point in time, we should be able to see Arcturus, Spica, Capella, or at the very least, Venus. It seems that, unbeknownst to us, some invisible clouds have appeared since sunset.

July 24th

We report: the morning clouds are slowly dissipating, and the light that they were catching is now spilling out onto the ground, puddles of sunshine everywhere. We shall soon pause our cloud-watching session, as our eyes are watering from the brightness.

July 23rd

We report: we cannot find any clouds today, but it is windy enough that we do not feel completely crushed by the weight of the sun. We watch the swallows play some sort of musical chairs game on the phone lines, to the sound of dry ferns swaying in the breeze.

July 22nd

We report: there is a lot of convection going on for the early morning, lifting up the clouds much higher than where we are used to seeing them at this hour. We feel like we missed out on a lot of weather already, which is an unpleasant note on which to start the day.

July 21st

We report after the last train, in the empty station. We punched in the code for a can of iced tea on the vending machine, and it came out lukewarm. We shared it with our expert while the stars rose from the ground, the fields before us unfathomable in the twilight.

July 20th

We report: with the apparition of asperitas clouds, even the more discrete ones, we still unconsciously expect a big storm, or at least big rain later on. In the end, today, like most of the times we’ve encountered asperitas, they dissolve without much of a fuss.

July 19th

We report: now that the temperatures are closer to the seasonal average, the sky has gotten more familiar to us. It is not so much about specific clouds, but rather the diversity, and the changes, the uncertainty. We realise we are not very fond of the certainty of a clear sky.

July 18th

We report: for a while, as we walk down the street, the  buildings and trees are too tall to let us get a good look, but the sunset’s glow is everywhere. It is incredibly damp, the amount of humidity barely under the point of saturation; sometimes, we feel a lone raindrop.

July 17th

We report: after the bit of rain that we had yesterday, the night sky is clearer than it had been in some weeks, much less hazy. We leave the constellation names aside, and let ourselves sit there and pretend each moving, blinking satellite in the sky is a shooting star.

July 16th

We report: we wait and wait for the rain, and once we stop waiting and hoping, the rain comes. Immediately, with the sky heavy, and the air saturated with water, we feel lighter. It goes on like this for hours, and even when it stops, the sky remains overcast. We breathe easier.

July 15th

We report on the horizon: a weak imitation of a squall line is helpfully displaying stages of the lifecycle of cumulonimbus, and in chronological order, too. Our expert finds it a valuable teaching moment, and spends some time pointing out the calvus and capillatus species.

July 14th

We report: something has gotten in the air - smoke, sand, humidity, the whole lot - and it has captured the sun some hours before dusk. A veil is drawn across the sky. There is a bit of a chill there, or at least, what counts as one these days, a little shiver in the half-light.