The Web

Threads of gossamer, threads of life, fairy bridges by a spider's wife...

Now apparently, there are certain spiders that weave on the approach of sunset in order to grab dinner from the cooler night skies. They weave with alternating patterns of sticky strands and unsticky so that they can maneuver through their step ladders without themselves becoming tangled...

I was discussing this with my friend, who has seen his spider rotate between two locations at the back of his house: off the awning at their back door and between their garden shed and the house itself (a span of more than four feet). This begs the question (if, indeed, we would beg about this) on the ability of the spider to attach that first strand and then traverse that four foot distance to begin building... Is it the wind that assists? Is it the unraveling and then reclaiming of a certain amount of web material? Or is it an incredible ability to jump?

This morning, as I left for work, this web had vanished...

Perspective

I love the clear, clean purple of morning glories...













...and putting my chin against the trunk of this tree, looking up...



it's a Sequoiadendron Wellingtonia which is a massive tree found in the Queenstown botanical gardens in New Zealand. As you can see, I had fun with the perspective.



Makes a difference which angle you pick, doesn't it?



Frankly, I was sick of looking at bug parts on my blog and thought I'd better get another picture up there.

There's a Food and Wine magazine food photo contest going on now and they are giving you a list of how to be good at shooting food. I'm debating whether or not to enter. It sounds like it would be fun to try.

What the....

What do you suppose this is?

You're sleeping. Soundly. And it's about 1:11 a.m. Suddenly, you feel this feathery sensation across your arms and chest. You wake up slappin' and flailin' and sit bolt upright in bed... To compose yourself, you take your dog downstairs for a drink of water and a spell in the backyard to check the perimeter and sniff around for dark activity. And then you go back upstairs...

At 1:15 a.m. I wish I would've had my camera, because still waiting in the sheets for me was about a four inch centipede, no millipede. Quickly, I gathered my killer instinct to squish him dead, right then, right there, right in the middle... of my bed, the bed that I really wanted to once again crawl into and find peace and slumber without anyone from the insect kingdom.

My killer instinct had to take a back seat to my better senses which said "Hey, make him fly!" and grabbing the ends of the sheets available to me, he flew and I never saw him again.

The next morning; however, I did see him. Or part of him...or his buddy...not sure. And the most unsettling part of this, is that I either got back into bed with these body parts, or I killed someone else instead of my first bed partner.

So I had to take the picture that time.