Sunday, April 15

It is too hot! I feel like I'm back at summer camp in the cabins with no air conditioning. That is partly due to the fact that the A/C in my dorm is broken (oh joy...) Once again, I am amazed at the speed the temperature can change in Alabama. Four days ago, it was in the low 60s at 6:00 PM, now it's the high seventies at  7:00PM!

Once again, clear skies though. However, I've heard that there have been some tornadoes in other parts of the country. So here is my perfectly legitimate plea to Mother Nature:

Dear Mother Nature,

What's with these mood swings?

I can't handle your hot flashes!

I know menopause is rough, 

but there is no need to lash out 

with tornadic wrath.

Just calm down.

Thanks :-)

Thursday, April 12

Perfect spring weather! I really don't think I belong in Alabama sometimes, and our crazy weather is one of the reasons why. However, today is BEAUTIFUL! This is what April should feel like! Not some crazy weather in the 80s!

The only clouds in the sky are nice, friendly, pure white wispy clouds.

And from some angles you can't see any clouds at all!

We have an outdoor concert at this amphitheater Saturday, I hope the nice weather (and temperature!) hangs on a few more days.

I know that in elementary or middle school I had to memorize some of the different types of clouds, but now I can only think of one: cumulonimbus (and that is thanks to the movie UP, not anything I remembered from school). I wanted to do a quick search on basic types of clouds and refresh my memory.

I found the snazzy chart here.
From this chart, I'm going to assume that the clouds today are either stratus or altostratus (I wouldn't even be able to guess if tehy were about 6,000 ft or not)

Thursday, April 5

This afternoon, I was minding my business and packing to go to Huntsville for a long, relaxing weekend. I was riding with my friend, Trent, who picked me up on his way through Birmingham from Tuscaloosa. He called me when he got to school and rushed me outside, I had no idea what was going on but I did as he asked. As soon as I stepped outside my dorm, I knew something was up the air pressure was strange, it was incredibly cloudy, and it was beginning to sprinkle (none of this had been present just an hour or so previously when I went into my dorm). As soon as I got my stuff in the car and we began to drive, the bottom fell out and the rain POURED around us. As we pulled off campus, I noticed one of the strangest cloud formations I had ever seen.

Trent says that he noticed this when leaving Tuscaloosa. He called it a wall cloud: a HUGE, DARK cloud that just suddenly ends leaving the sun shining through. Here is another view of the cloud.

Notice how the cloud just ends and the sun brightly shines through on the other side! This fascinated me! I've always wondered how far you had to drive before the rain would just stop or if the weather would gradually  become less and less fierce until you reached the end of the storm and it stopped. In this case, it would suddenly end when you reached the end of the cloud! Unfortunately, the end of the cloud was in the opposite direction that we were driving, so Trent and I decided to stop for dinner and wait out the rain. Thanks to our snazzy iPhone weather and radar apps, we knew that if we waited about half an hour, the rain would be either much lighter or gone entirely.

Wednesday, April 5

Today, my Facebook newsfeed was full of pictures of rainbows! I have decided that since rainbows are natural and are related to weather, I wanted to research what caused them. I attempted to take a picture of the rainbow myself, but my photography skills failed me today so I borrowed a photo taken by my friend, Miranda, that she posted on her facebook.

Paraphrased from HowStuffWorks:
Rainbows are created when light enters through one side of a raindrop in the air, is reflected on the other, and then leaves the drop. The raindrop acts as a prism and breaks up the light into a spectrum of colors.

My facebook friends also expressed their wonder at a double rainbow (thanks, I'm sure, to this lovely video). A double rainbow is created when the raindrops in the sky are a certain size that allows them to create two reflections internally. The fact that raindrops have to be a particular size is the reason why double rainbows are more rare than single rainbows.

Friday, March 30

I wanted to check the weather the next day to show if the sudden coolness had any effect the next day.

Up in the left hand corner of the radar screen, you can see that there is some sort of storm system moving in this direction. The change in temperature meant a change in weather, again! The weather, for once, is doing what I predicted! (I am too excited about this. I am so used to checking the weather, planning out what to wear, and having it change and be too hot/cold/rainy for whatever I chose to wear).

Though with these clouds in the sky, I hope I would have remembered an umbrella even without the help of the radar!

Thursday, March 29

This has been a strange year for weather. Last year, it snowed through January. This year it decided to almost skip winter entirely and go straight to being warm! However, this week it has began to cool down. Hopefully this is not a sign of impending rain and storms to come.

Unfortunately, thus far in this blog, I have noticed that changes (especially significant ones) in temperature seem to bring unpleasant weather soon after.

SPRING BREAK March 17-25: Avada's Interlude

Because our assignment was to find something natural on campus to write about twice a week, I decided that for Spring Break I would write about my betta fish, Avada.

Before Spring Break, I was afraid for a while that I was going to lose him. Avada was acting very depressed. For a few days he wouldn't even eat! From my research on Betta fish, I have learned that they eat like pigs! In the wild, they could go days without food, so when they do have food in front of them they eat all that they can. This makes the feeding instructions on my Betta fish food bad advice- it says "feed once or twice daily as much as your fish can consume within several minutes." If I followed these rules, I could easily overfeed Avada and he could die.

Anyway, in order to transport Avada from BSC to Huntsville, I put him in his lovely IKEA Tupperware.

Generally, when I put him in this container he is less active but, strangely, he became more active as the week went on. At one point, I took him to my brother's apartment on (what was SUPPOSED to be except my car decided to be dumb) my way back to Birmingham. My brother also has a Betta fish. When I put Avada's container next to Phillip's fish's bowl, Phillip's fish instantly began to puff out his gills and try to fight Avada. Betta fish are Japanese FIGHTING fish, after all. Avada did seem interested in Phillip's fish, but he never puffed up his gills (which he has often done to me if I got too close to his bowl) and actually began to back away after a while. I thought this was strange, especially considering that Phillip's fish was a little bit smaller than Avada. However, Phillip's fish was a different species of Betta, so that may have something to do with it?

My curiosity about Avada's reaction to Phillip's fish led me to put a mirror next to Avada's container that night. He instantly began to puff his gills and want to fight with himself, even when I used the size of the mirror that magnified!

 Avada continued to be very active the next day, even when I put him back into his bowl that evening. He has been perky and playful since then, even on his return to school this afternoon!

When he was acting so strange last week, I did some research. According to many sites, fish can get depressed. I was skeptical when I read this, but after he had a change of view for a few days, he seems much happier. Maybe he was depressed?