Rain, Rain, Go Away

It's rainy and dismal in Ottawa today, the kind of day where I should be thinking how good it is for brown and crispy strands of straw that pass for the lawn around where I live, but instead I focus on what a downer this kind of weather is. I'm still drying out from my foray into the deluge, fresh from a steaming bowl of smoked meat poutine at Dunn's Deli, the dish that takes the award for being the *best* idea for a meal when you see it on the menu and the *worst* when you finish it. If you finish it, that is.

Stacey and I were on our way to our swim last night (which, by the way, was dampened by a kid peeing in the hot tub, which they closed for the rest of the evening after it happened...pun intended on the dampening thing) when Stacey pointed out some long, thin, corrugated-looking clouds that were very high in the sky, and knowing that I was a geography-knowing-kinda-guy, asked me what kind of clouds they were. "Well," I told her, "Those are Cirrocumulus clouds..." and proceeded to give a less-than-coordinated explanation of how fronts, air masses, and clouds worked to create weather (I'm a little rusty considering I haven't studied meteorology since 1st year, and then only for a week). I foretold that based on the clouds that she saw, it would probably rain within the next nine or ten hours. I'm pleased that I turned out to be right, but I'm not pleased it's raining.

Anyway, I was doing some research this morning to refresh my memory about clouds. If you'd like to be able to predict weather by looking at the clouds or know how the different weather-generating mechanisms work, take a look at this USA Today site, which is by far one of the most complete sources of reference material I've found so far.