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Juvenile grey treefrog on rose bushThis is just a couple of quick comments – nothing really thought-provoking. I say that as if it’s different from the rest of the content…

The Girlfriend purchased a rose bush on Saturday, as a gift for her daughter-in-law. While on the phone with my dad on Sunday, I was looking idly at the bush and noticed the occupant you see here, who almost certainly came along for the ride. That it remained on the bush and did not bail it in the car, even though it spent some time locked within during a pretty hot period, is impressive. In size, it’s just barely bigger than a thumbnail, a literal one – about one-third the size of an adult. Here’s hoping that it decides to stick around, and to try and facilitate that, I shifted the planter for my salvia next to it – this has a water reservoir in the bottom, that a few years back served as a home for another treefrog one summer.

Since I hadn’t spoken with him in a while, I related the tale of trying to get hit by lightning. Now, a little background. Despite the content often seen here, and my fiercely atheistic stance, my dad actually does guest sermons at a few churches in his area – neither one of us is, apparently, having much of an affect on the other. So, while I had my own humorous take on the proximity of the strike, he had a completely different (though still humorous) perspective. Since I’d already told him that I’d send him a print shortly, he said that it if arrived in time, he’d use it as a topic for his next guest sermon.

Um, yeah. So a photo of mine is going to be used to reinforce religion, is it? What do you think: should I charge appropriately, since churches collect money every week from their members so this counts as commercial use, or should I simply stipulate that it can only be used with a prominent link to the blog? I’m open for alternate suggestions.

Animated lightning multi-exposureWhile waiting on those responses (I imagine it will be a while,) I’ll leave you with an animation made from twelve consecutive frames of that storm. These were all ten-second exposures with roughly ten seconds or less in between, so overall this spans just under three minutes – you’ve seen cropped versions of two of these frames in that earlier post. Right after the last frame seen here, I switched camera position, so the big ground strike – which occurred three frames later – could not be included in the gif (pronounced “hal-a-PEEN-yo”) without drastic cropping. Still, this does a great job of illustrating the twisting and depth of the clouds, and the activity therein.