Today I had no time before it got dark to catch any clouds, except this fellow toward the south as I drove home. I tried to rush over to the west part of town where some exciting sunset cloud action was happening, but was not able to photograph anything as I got distracted by the film crew in the truck stop. Some movie set in “Grover Cleveland,” according to the big film sign.

But this baby, yeah, it’s altostratus again. Mid-level, sun-blocker, occasional precipitation. Consulting Weather: A Visual Guide by Bruce Buckley, Edward J. Hopkins and Richard Whitaker, this wet blanket was somewhere between 2000 and 6100 metres above me.

A coworker also keeping a cloud diary emailed me today to ask me if what she did see on her drive to work was indeed an altostratus and a bunch of altocumuluses. I haven’t spotted any altocumulus yet, so I couldn’t verify this sighting.

This morning’s cloud fulfills some of the characteristics of altostratus: mid-level stratiform grey cloud covering the sun so that no shadows are cast. “Altostratus has sometimes been described as a boring cloud,” says my copy of The Weather Identification Handbook by Storm Dunlop (that’s really his name).

Damn, as I right this, our altostratus has thinned enough that I have the sun in my eyes and a shadow on the wall behind me. Sometimes altostratus does let the sun shine through.

Usually altostratus is more uniform, whereas this cloud has more puffy bits.

Nevertheless, the altostratus usually precedes rainy nimbostratus. So guess what I saw farther to the west?

This dark grey cloud means a rainy day in Vancouver. Unlike altostratus, it’s thick enough that you can’t see any indication of sun. Though altostratus may or may not drop its water load, nimbostratus almost certainly will bring precipitation.

Update: Towards the end of the day, I saw a whole mess of clouds. Unfortunately, I could only sneak out of work to catch a few of them. Check out these cumulus:

Here’s a detail - almost makes you think I was in an airplane (about to leave this hellhole that is Vancouver).

Because I need to know all about clouds by March 28 (never mind why), I need a cloud diary. Because I need to marry the photos I take of our daily clouds with my notes on what I observe, what better medium for a cloud diary than the blog.

So.

Today, I am guessing that the 5 pm photo above shows a stratus cloud. Mind you, I suspect in Vancouver every day will be a stratus cloud day. How do we know it’s a stratus? It’s a featureless grey layer, basically a fog in the sky. Fog is just a stratus cloud at ground-level. The stratus is a low-level cloud, but higher. So it’s a stratus cloud. Or is it?

Here’s where I get confused. There was this rain thing happening as these supposed stratus clouds dominated today’s skies. Yet, stratus clouds have little precipitation. This stratus, however, was precipitating plenty. Yes, it was drizzle, heavy drizzle in continuous streams. The stratiform clouds - stratus is Latin for layer - include the annoyingly mysterious stratus and the nimbostratus cloud. Nimbostratus is the more rainy one. However, nimbostratus has a ragged bottom, while this one was wispy.

When I went to Japan for the first time in 1998, I made it in time to witness the birth of the Ganguro movement. The practitioners of this extreme fashion movement tanned themselves to a brown crisp, smeared on white eye and lip makeup to reach clown consistency, and dressed in the usual slutty outfits of the pre-marriage Japanese female. (For Ganguro etymology, see its Wikipedia page; for a step-by-step Ganguro makeover, see this WikiHow page.)

While I, like many others, find the look ugly, I did appreciate the result it achieved. These girls weren’t going for the mainstream look. Even loose socks - the droopy thick legwarmer-like socks so popular with the Japanese high school bad girl - were inducted into the mainstream porn industry as signifier of debauched youth. The Ganguro look will probably never be part of the salary man fantasy (aside from the odd freak fetishist). When the Ganguro gals emerged, middle-aged men started complaining that these girls weren’t pretty and, thus, not suitable for trysts. I thought it took guts to position oneself outside of the mainstream by intentionally making oneself ugly.

Even more so, I liked that the look blew a “fuck-you” kiss to the middle-aged male consumers of teen female beauties. It firmly shut the door to adult males who want to be part of the teen world; whether middle-aged salary men or the marketing departments that feed on teen materialism wanted or not, for once, the girls were taking charge of beauty regimens and using them for simple aesthetics instead of aiming to please anyone. Well, anyone older than 25.

The look appealed to the males Ganguro girls were seeking to woo - the Japanese equivalent of the stoned surfer dude. One of the truths of femalehood is that, when we dress up to go on the town, we’re really not counting on some ugly old fart paying us any attention, or at least we can’t really believe he’d take his chances with us seriously. The look we work so hard on achieving is meant to attract the one guy we have our hearts set on, or at least a broad range of guys who most resemble what we want. Anyone else happening to gaze upon on us at that moment should pretty well just realize that they are not part of the equation and it’s through sheer luck that they can enjoy our outside beauty. However, many men, especially the creepy ones, haven’t figured it out. Ganguro girls, unlike the rest of us, practically ensure that no one outside their target demographic will hit on them. Their style weeds out the unwanted riff-raff.

Via Cutesypoo, here’s a five-minute documentary* on the Ganguro look:

At last, the Ganguro has been sort of subsumed by the mainstream. Apparently, there are now Ganguro guided tours in Tokyo. These tours even end with that stereotypical East Asian tourist group photo.One more note: among the background dancers in the opening sequence, you’ll notice one of the girls has an eye patch. Just before I left Japan in 2003, I first spotted this look. This means that, since it began surfacing then, it must have been around in the fetishist underground for a while. The eye patch look apparently plays around the idea that the girl wearing it has been injured and the male viewer can muster up some pity. Personally, I think it also plays on the idea of the subservient female and, through this, the beaten woman; it shows a man that, outspoken slut though she may be, the woman wearing it is still girly enough to be stabbed in the eye and not fight back her aggressor, therefore, she still has enough meekness to accept the ugly male flirter. Or, in other words, the shrew can still be brought under control.*Even though I still hate YouTube, if you can’t beat them, join them.

It’s not the first time Ivan has identified with our rodent friends. He has always been fascinated with our hamsters:

He noted, for example, that hamsters line their beds with toilet paper.

Here’s Crenguța in bed:

And Valentina:

And Lucian:

Of course, Ivan followed suit:

Now that we’ve switched to guinea pigs, Ivan is having identity issues again. This time, he’s gone a bit further:

Matt described the event: “The pigs actually weren’t very disturbed when Ivan climbed in there, so I didn’t worry about them too much (Chuy actually likes Ivan quite a bit, and will follow him around), but about 30 minutes later, the fact that they’d shared naptime with a cat seemed to have sunk in, and they were a little retroactively freaked out, requiring lots of cilantro and fresh hay to compensate for. . . . ”

Apparently, there was some hay-eating on Ivan’s part too.

It’s a good thing the guy I married likes cities. I don’t mind the countryside in short doses, but I usually need to get back to the city pretty soon.

Nature?

Ha. I like animals and the environment and all. But camping? You’ve got to be kidding. How do you wash off the eye crust in the morning when you’re camping? That stuff about peeing, then burying your wet dirt, then burning your toilet paper - who keeps their hands clean through that? Or sleeping on a bed of tree roots?

I went camping. Once, in California, we woke up to find that ants had eaten half our plastic containers. Another time, I woke up in the rain, which eventually seeped into the tent and my sleeping bag. I think there was another time I went camping too, and I’m pretty sure it was shitty also.

Then there’s all that crap about the Blair Witch sneaking up and stealing your friends and leaving you bloody packages. Or dudes with hockey masks.

Yeah, fuck nature.

So, back to cities. They’ve got bookshops, libraries, ethnic grocery stores, people who talk about other countries, rapid transit, easy-walkin’ roads, and museums. They are fun. (Unless there’s a zombie armageddon and the pace of infection rates would make anyone eager to make a run for the boonies.)

As far as cities go, though, they are not all equal. New York, good. Vienna, good. Paris, good. Hong Kong, good. Tokyo, good. Taipei, now there’s a city!

But Montreal, sucks. So does Los Angeles, London, Calgary. Houston, I am told, also sucks.*

Luckily Matt likes cities too. He thinks the countryside is ok but he’d rather return to the city asap, too.

So when I asked Matt what makes a city worthwhile to him, takes it above the crap cities, know what he said. Worthwhile cities have an Ikea.

“Bucureşti has an Ikea,” I said. “Does that count?”

“Well, um,” said Matt, mulling it over.

Then, “Uh oh, Dallas doesn’t have an Ikea.”

Yeah, Dallas, the honourary good city thanks to its fantastic Tex-Mex restaurants, is maybe not good enough.

*Matt says I would really my show my love for him if I rephrased this bit as: “But Montreal, sucks. So does Los Angeles, London, Calgary and Houston.”

“Hey, look at that predator that out-masses us, let’s make friends with him!”

Or so wrote our friend Lee as the caption to this photo.

This is Paco:

Paco is a pet name for Francisco. But he went directly to being a Paco (and sometimes a Paquito) without ever having gone through being called a Francisco.

He’s a guinea pig, you see, and a Peruvian animal, hence, thanks to cultural imperialism, he’s a Spanish speaker. Hamsters, because of their link to Romania, get Romanian names (preferably ones only Romanians understand).

And here is Chuy:

Chuy is a pet name for Jesús. It’s pronounced something like “Chew-y” (though not quite so bi-syllabic, says Matt). It’s also the name of a Tex-Mex restaurant chain in Matt’s homeland. On another food-related note, Chuy is one letter off cuy, the guinea pig dish that shocks and delights tourists in Peru.

Chuy is the shyer of the two. Already Paco has taken a liking to Matt, while Chuy prefers me. Paco also feels some compulsion to bite Matt every time Matt picks him up.

Other things we’ve noticed in the few hours hours lives have intermeshed:

1. There have been bubbling, wheating, sneezing, whimpering and chattering noises. We look forward to learning the mysterious language of the guinea pigs.

2. Paco is afraid of the dark.

3. Paco and Chuy love carrots and cilantro.

4. Matt has taken to calling them The Cattle. “Our living room smells barn-y,” said Matt, sniffing at the hay that is the staple guinea pig food.

5. Our friend S. of Small Animal Rescue of BC called Paco and Chuy the “Brillo pigs.” Their fur is indeed very bristly, nothing like the amazing softness of a Syrian hamster.

6. Paco and Chuy like Ivan better than us.

7. Guinea pigs don’t need as much sleep as hamsters.

8. We have noticed two kinds of guinea pig poops. Are guinea pigs coprophagic?

9. Paco has a black paw and a white paw.

10. Guinea pigs can sure run.

Why did we decide to give up on hamsters? Well, we didn’t really. After Lucian’s sudden death last September, we’ve been quite unhappy. We still aren’t ready to replace Lucian with another hamster. Nor can we quite yet bear to fall in love with a new hamster and have our hearts torn when that new hamster inevitably passes away.

Whereas a hamster has a life-span averaging around two years, Paco and Chuy, both at three months, will be part of the household until about 2013.

Google “100 things to do before you die” and the first page that comes up is this one. That’s where someone sent me a few days ago. I’m into crossing things off my 100 things list, so I started greedily checking off my achievements. I was pretty proud of myself, until I got to number 19: Grow a beard and leave it for at least a month.

What?!!!

In my case - as well as 52% of the population - number 19 isn’t a viable option! Well, not without ample steroids. But I ain’t going to burgle Stallone’s mansion anytime soon.

It all comes down to this: whoever penned that list isn’t female. He forgot women can’t just magically decide to be all Jesus-like on a whim. This list is sexist!