The Cloud Cycle

In this post I present to you 3sons Peruvian Grand Nimbus of Howling Hill Alpacas. I received a box with two of his wonderful fleeces in it a few weeks back. His yearling (baby) fleece, and his second year ribboned fleece. It's a wonderful brightly soft white. The first thing I noticed, was how much it resembled sheep fleece! I took it to Tricia Rasku (master spinner, wonderful lady) and she agreed. Therefore I'm not totally off my rocker, or she off hers too. I vote for the former. So, for the first part of our educational display, I give you, the cloud :

Clouds are formed when water vapour in the air cools and condenses as part of the water cycle. Alternately they can be gestated for 11 months, and raised on a healthy diet of orchard grass hay, fresh pasture, and pellets.

Occasionally, it will rain. When cloud droplets (or ice particles) in clouds grow and combine to become so large that the updrafts in the clouds can no longer support them, and they fall to the ground as rain:

Hail is made up of frozen raindrops – solid chunks of ice more than 5 mm in diameter. It forms when raindrops are tossed high up by winds inside huge cumulonimbus clouds. They freeze into ice and are continually bounced up and down inside the cloud. As they rise and fall like this, more ice builds up in layers around them. After a certain period of time the hail will turn into a baby hat, swallow a skein of cascade 220, and attach itself to a pumpkin. This phenomenon, while not as well known as Frog hail, is only slightly less common.
It's getting to be that season her in the Kootenays, where dropping temperatures cause snow to fall instead of rain. Everyone knows that every snowflake is different from the next, but I'm sure some of you have seen one similar to this before :
Up next, we have some a cyclone, a dynamo, and the Suri incarnation of coal.