To this day at age 53, I can still remember those rare, one or two or three individual days where the clouds were "perfect".
So perfect that I can still place myself in that exact moment of past time, years ago.
This was usually the fantastic puffy cumulus clouds after a period of a grey rainstorm, and the sky was clear and blue, but with bold individual clouds.... seemingly freed of their rain-dropping duties or chores.
Or another time, when an unusually cold storm came over Los Angeles, and dropped several inches of snow -- to my usually snow-less area @ 1200 ft.
Those clouds were completely unusual to what we see in LA.
(this, during snow at low elevation)
It's these memories of "perfect" clouds and cloud events, that we tend to gauge and compare all future clouds against.
But Gavin Pretor-Pittney is correct.....it's the everyday chaos and uncertainty of clouds that truly makes them amazing.