I had taken so many cloud pictures last year that I decided to pick the best/wierdest, upload them to Shutterfly, and create some "homemade" Christmas presents--my first Annual Calendar of the Clouds. This would be a step up from my only other homemade gift--the potholder (yes, the loops, the loom, the colorful woven wonder).

The difficult part of creating the calendar was selecting the photographs. An hour in the Pacific Northwest will easily yield a year of calendar pages. It took me a day to pick the twenty or so photos that I had taken over the year. The photograph of two dissipation trails (above) is in the calendar. "Distrails" are a relatively rare phenomenon resulting from jet planes flying through a layer of high cirrocumulus and cirrostratus clouds. They form in a few ways: When the heat of the exhaust warms the cloud layer and causes the evaporation of the water particles in the cloud; when turbulence from the plane mixes drying surrounding air into the cloud and causes evaporation; or when the tiny particles in the exhaust "seed" the cloud and cause the water droplets to freeze, grow, fall, and evaporate in the warmer air below the cloud. I snapped this rare double-distrail from my front yard.

Here are some of the other picks from 2009. If you'd like to order a calendar from Shutterfly, send me a note and I'll send you the link. If you'd like a homemade potholder, you're on your own.