Category Archives: Clouds

A doctor visit

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First things first; so what have the dogs been up to?

Dogs like Cheetos. In fact, I’m pretty sure this dog likes Cheetos more than we do.

Sam likes thumbs from leather gloves. I caught him before he ate the whole thing. I’m not joking about eating it; either he ate the thumb, or he’s really good at hiding stuff.

We had some light snow back in December. Some canid not a domestic dog left its tracks on the road. I suspect a fox. Look at the shadow to Zoe’s left. It’s not Zoe’s shadow. That’s Sam, best known for blue eyes and big, erect ears.

We had some nice days, too, sunny and warm, but not too warm, well suited for lounging for a few minutes. I hardly ever sit down in the grass of our front yard, so Sam was a little concerned. He also wanted pets.

Zoe invited a few Doberman friends over for a friendly game of poker.

Dobermans do not play poker. This is an image generated by an application called wall-e 2, which uses some kind of AI to generate images based on a simple instruction. The instruction for this image was “doberman pinchers playing poker in the style of Normal Rockwell.”

Actually, Zoe does play poker, but for her, poker means “poke her”, which she plays with the cat using her nose.

Speaking of weather (or were we?), something woke me up just at dawn a few days ago and I was able to see the sunrise. It was nice.

I hear that the sun rises almost every day, and often it’s quite picturesque. Maybe some day I will go to bed early enough to get up and see more of them.

Afternoons can offer nice skies, too.

Look at the evidence of wind shear, waves going two different directions. The sky over the parking lot was about all that our local Walmart had to offer, given the continuing supply chain problems.

Oh, about that doctor visit.

I went to my vascular specialist on Thursday of last week to talk about pulmonary embolisms, or blood clots as I don’t like to call them. Since my clots were not explained by any of the normal causes or risk factors, the various physicians I have dealt with have mentioned that cancer often causes blood clots. My vascular specialist repeated that, and added that in 10-to-20 percent of cases of unexplained pulmonary embolisms, cancer is diagnosed within two years.

I went home after that because it seemed like the best place to go. I considered not telling Leah what the doctor said, because I knew she would worry. I was right about that. I told her not to worry, and that, while I was considering potential courses of action should I be diagnosed with cancer, that was not the same thing as worrying. I spoke to my primary care doctor the next day, and he was more reassuring. He said that a cancer that was advanced to the point of causing blood clots would almost certainly be causing other symptoms, of which I had none.

The main concern at this point was that imaging of my chest right after my blood clots had found a nodule in my lung. Doctors said that it was small and did not show some typical features of a cancer, so it was probably benign. But not definitely.

I told Leah that we should hold off on the worrying until I saw the pulmonary specialist on Thursday of this week. I had a CT scan last Friday in preparation for that appointment to see whether the nodule had grown, which would be bad, or was the same, which would be good. The pulmonary specialist told me it had not changed in the six months since the previous CT scan. So, good news. In fact, he said it was probably not really a “nodule” but rather an enlarged lymph node possibly from a past infection, or something.

He said, “You do not have cancer.”

But the mention of an infection causing the enlarged lymph node made me wonder. About 10 years ago I had some heart function problems that were potentially pretty serious. A few months after that was diagnosed, my heart functions had recovered to the point that one of the two cardiologists I had seen discharged me. I asked what had caused my problem and why had it essentially cleared up. The cardiologist said he didn’t know, but that it might have been some kind of infection. So I asked my pulmonary specialist if the enlarged lymph node could have been caused by the same thing that caused my heart problem. He said it certainly could have been.

The doctor wants me to have another CT scan in a year, just to be sure, although the radiologist who read the CT image said there was no need for more imaging.

When I drove back home I felt as if a weight I didn’t realize I had been carrying had been lifted from my shoulder. I felt pretty good. When’s the last time you felt that good after leaving a doctor’s office?

Bits and pieces

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I find interesting things when I walk down our driveway. This is a shot of a deceased snake.

Isn’t it beautiful? It’s a scarlet snake, a fairly common snake found from New Jersey to Texas, mainly in coastal plains and piedmont regions. This snake was probably less than 10 inches long. Its range is shown as not extending into the Appalachians, including out area of northwest Georgia. So, it’s out of its normal range.

I don’t know how it died, but I suspect a cat might have been involved.

I have also been finding the dehydrated remains of adventurous traveling snails who underestimated the rigors of crossing the Great Driveway Desert. They are there every morning when I walk out. I found more than a dozen on the day I took this photo.

If you look carefully you can see the trails of the snails and their little shells at the end. There are three or four in this photo. They are mostly very small, only about half the size of my little finger nail. I don’t know whether they are dead, but I toss them into the dewy grass. Maybe they can get enough moisture to revive there.

This is the last hurrah of our flower garden. This iris (I think) stands about six feet tall. There is another bloom getting ready to open, but it has been getting cooler at night lately, so I don’t know whether it will succeed.

A few nights ago I went out to let the dogs relieve themselves, and the nearly-full moon seemed about to be drawn into a vortex of clouds.

It’s a good thing so much interesting stuff happens on out driveway, since I so rarely get far from it. I did manage to get one sunset shot on one of our grocery shopping excursions.

Some photos

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I haven’t posted for a while, so I have a backlog of photos. Here are a few of them.

There was a nice shower over town a week ago (or so) that produced an almost complete rainbow.

Later, some clouds got in the action.

Some of the flowers in the flower bed beside our house were in bloom. The irises are impressive, but they don’t last too long. This is looking towards the thick tangle of trees across the driveway. The crape myrtles are just starting to bloom.

Looking back towards the house.

Here are some closer shots.

More recently we have had an invasion of Japanese beetles. This is the first year they have been a problem, at least above ground. I looked at our crape myrtles a few days ago and saw a few of them. I couldn’t reach the tops of the plants where the beetles like to do their business, so I sprayed some pesticide. It scared away a lot of beetles, but probably didn’t do any good. Yesterday I noticed them on the yellow flowers you can see in the foreground of the third photo above. I think the flowers are irises.

My preferred method of control is to get a container of hot, soapy water and drown them. They have a defense mechanism that makes that approach work reasonably well. When the beetles are disturbed, most of the time they simply drop from their perch. I place the container immediately beneath them, so they drop into the water. The detergent reduces the surface tension, so they sink and drown. Here is my first harvest.

I didn’t count them, but I estimate more than 50 and probably less than 100.

On Sunday I found more. I got around 30 this time. I hope their numbers continue to decline. They are seriously destructive. The crape myrtle blooms that were visible in the first shot of the flowers are no longer visible; they have been eaten, along with a lot of the upper foliage. They have also eaten away a lot of the irises, and some of their foliage.

I surprised a lot of them in the throes of passion. That was particularly satisfying because of what the offspring do.

I was not aware that their larvae damage grass roots and can cause visible damage to the grass above ground. I have noticed a few places where my grass is not doing well. I don’t know whether Japanese beetles are responsible, but I spent enough time, money and effort on our front yard that I don’t intend to let the little bastards damage the grass. Traps for the adult beetles apparently cause more harm than good because they attract far more beetles than they trap. Biological warfare against the larvae seems to be an effective course of action, although it can take years to work well. I will probably get some of the bacteria that are used (a bacterium called Paenibacillus popilliae.) Then I will poison them.

Fallstreak

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Leah and I were on our way to a doctor’s appointment Friday morning when we saw a strange cloud formation. We got enough glimpses to get a good idea of what it looked like, but we didn’t have time to stop. When we got to the doctor’s office, the hospital across the street blocked most of the view, but I was able to get this picture.

The clouds we saw on the way had circular holes opening into blue sky above the cloud cover, and wispy streaks of falling ice crystals inside the hole. You can see a hint of that in the right edge of the image above, and what might be the start of another opening immediately over the hospital on the left. This might also be an oblique view where the falling ice crystals hide the blue sky.

This phenomenon is called a fallstreak hole, or a punch hole cloud. This is one of many fallstreak hole images you can find online.

You can see the roughly circular hole with clear sky above, and the ice crystals falling from the hole.

Both of the local TV stations we watched Friday night showed images of these fallstreak holes taken by viewers. It’s rare enough that the Sacramento (Ca) Bee reported on it in their online publication.

These odd formations are caused by a combination of the right weather conditions and the presence of an airplane to fly through. The clouds are middle to high altitude cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds formed from supercooled water drops. These drops are liquid water with a temperature below the normal freezing point. They require some kind of disturbance to cause them to freeze. That disturbance is provided by an airplane that flies through the cloud. According to some analysts, the changes in air pressure caused by the passage of the wing or by propellers can be enough to cause ice crystals to form. Others suggest that particles from jet engine exhaust provide ice nuclei to start the freezing process. The freezing droplets form crystals, which grow into even larger crystals. When they get big enough, they fall. If the cloud conditions are right, essentially all the droplets in a region of the cloud form crystals and fall, leaving a clear hole in the cloud. The hole grows outward as more ice crystals form from the initial disturbance. The holes can grow up to several tens of kilometers wide.

The holes can be circular, elliptical, or linear. Linear fallstreak holes are called canals. Fallstreak holes are also called hole punch, punch hole, sky punch, or cloud holes. The canal fallstreak holes are caused by an airplane that flies at a shallow angle through the clouds.

Fallstreak holes are sometimes visible from space. Here is a NASA image of fallstreak holes and canals over eastern Texas and Louisana in January 2007.

This was the first time I had ever seen a fallstreak hole in real life, although Robin had an image of what I assume was a fallstreak in one of her newdharmabums posts. According to NASA, altocumulus clouds are mostly composed of water droplets supercooled to a temperature of about -15C, and such clouds cover about 8 percent of Earth’s surface at any given time. It seems kind of odd that the right clouds are relatively common, and airplanes to fly though them seem pretty common, but the fallstreak holes themselves are so rare.

More clouds

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A weak cold front came through this area early Thanksgiving morning. There was some rain, and then some clearing, perfect conditions for fog to form. And it did.

We could see nothing of town. I imagine the people down there couldn’t see much either.