Once upon a time, some water in the ocean was warmed by the sun and floated up into the sky in little bits so small no one could see them. When the water got up high enough, the little bits started to stick together, and they made some little clouds. And one of the little clouds was named Gerald.

Gerald the Cloud

A brief discussion of clouds and could types with Z during a long car ride got me thinking that an interesting story could be made of characters who were different cloud types, and I liked the idea of a character who formed at the beginning of a story and dissipated at the end, as a part of the water cycle. I bounced some ideas off Jenni and then wrote and edited and wrote some more until I came up with something to present to my daughter. Having already heard a rough cut of "The Two Bears and the Carousel," our first audio story release, I found it easier to think of the story in terms of its sounds; theatre actor and director Josiah Wallace made great use of the opportunities for sound effects. As with our previous release, Ken McNichols composed and performed music, and Joshua McNichols, a reporter at Seattle public radio station KUOW, recorded, collected sound effects, and mixed the audio. Some stereo effects are lost in mono listening (the mountain goat's heartbeat, for example) but the story should work on any device.

You can listen to the file by clicking on the story title above, or right-click on it to "Save As" and download the mp3 file. We're also now hosting these stories on an "Audio Archive" page on Punnybop, where we'll organize all future hosted and original entertainment content. (Yep, we have plans.)

This file is hereby released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. You are welcome to download, share, and remix it as you like, provided you credit this original work, cite ZRecs.com as its creator, do not distribute it or derivative works for profit, and link to it so others can find it at the source.

Photo by KmountMan, shared via Flickr. - Jeremiah