Jiskaske nou rankontre ankò, August!

Squeaking in under the wire with this one, getting out two specially-produced abstract images to see August on its way (since I found absolutely nothing during my normal perambulations.) Will this make them better, or worse than normal? Who’s judging? Who’s reading?

Anyway, what I produced after a little playing around a short while ago:


A handful of people might recognize read more

Banana (spider) for scale

While I was out last night photographing the Estate Find, I grabbed two other images of opportunity and I’ll throw them up now.

I’ve mentioned the explosion of golden silk orbweavers (Trichonephila clavipes) on the property, but they’re getting big now, and I needed an illustration read more

Still here, really

These long empty stretches keep happening, and probably will, since there are plenty of other things going on here that need my attention, so the posts get neglected. Plus, those same things keep me from finding new images or topics. So, we’ll have just a couple of sideline pics gathered here and there just to prove I’m not dead. But also consider, I could be resorting to AI to generate read more

This could be easier

For the past several weeks, I’ve been getting messages in the WordPress dashboard about my site’s PHP version being beyond security updates, and that I should switch to a newer one. No sweat the host has this easily accessible and lists numerous versions I can switch to. Only, the moment I do, any of them, the blog site goes down.

This is generally an indication that something on the read more

Estate Finds XXXIV

Nothing too exciting this week, so I’m making up for it by providing several different things – quantity instead of quality, the bywords of the US.

Let’s start with one that I discovered while mowing, and thus had to resort to the smutphone to capture, which once again convinced me how much they suck.


The mantids have not been highly visible on the property, and read more

Thinking like that

Because I’m a supporter of George Hrab’s Geologic podcast, I receive his weekly newsletter, and the one from July 5th [yes, this sat in editing limbo for a bit] contained an article on superstition that he’d written for the James Randi Educational Foundation back in 2008. I’d done a post myself read more

To beat twenty-three

Last night I took The Girlfriend out to the side of the driveway (livin’ large, you know it!) because the previous evening I’d found that the overgrown spot was loaded with newborn Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) all sleeping on the tall weeds there. Not quite as many there last night, seven as opposed to the eight that I’d seen the night before, but it was still read more

Well, yes, and no…

Today marked another opportunity to capture a transit, and this time, we had clear skies and I kept the timing straight in my head and everything. The target was the Tiangong space station, China’s own entry into low-Earth-orbit experiments and observations, and the waning crescent moon. I checked everything, read more

Estate Find XXXIII: The secret is corn

Last week’s Find was still fresh on the, um, server memory thingy, whatever, when I got the first clips of this week’s. A few days later I was able to add to the stock, so we have a couple of days worth of observations, which also added in the number of other species appearing. So without further ado:

Now, this was not a total surprise, because we’d been down at the neighbor’s read more

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