Lazy Sunday This and That

Today our son Darby and his wife Net are coming to visit, so the morning will be busy with food preparation and pie-making. I prepare the food, Denny makes the pie. Patches will hide because she knows that something is going on, even if she doesn't know what it is.

Our week was busy since we were helping my mother set up and run the estate sale she had contracted for, along with some garden maintenanceinCinci (the deer are ahead 2 to 0). Denny had to move the perimeter fencing around the garden closer to the plants and I placed the bags of mothballs on the fencing rather than the individual tomato stakes. The rain and sprinkler system are melting the mothballs, so the deer ate the tops off all twelve plants this week, destroying nine ripening tomatoes and two green peppers. We're hoping that by moving the bags of mothballs to the fence that the water from the sprinkler won't hit the mothballs and
melt them so quickly.

My picture taking opportunities were limited this week and the pictures I tried to take didn't come out. It quickly became obvious to me that taking pictures of
spiders,caterpillars and spider webs require special lens and expertise to come out
properly. My camera just couldn't decide where to focus and since I have a cat dragging me at one end of a leash I don't have time to figure out a manual focus/aperture/speed thingy. Therefore you'll have to use your imagination to picture emerald green spiders, the sunlight making sun catchers out of spider webs and small, fuzzy white caterpillars climbing silken threads from the ground thirty feet
up into a black walnut tree. I truly wish that picture had come out.


Our attempt at deterring the deer. Pretty, but ineffective when the rains melt the mothballs inside the blue net bags.


My father-in-law said that it couldn't be deer eating the plants--here's the evidence.


Okay, this was going to be a really cool picture of
caterpillars crawling up webs strung from the ground into this tall
black walnut tree. Bright sky combined with leaves combined with tiny
caterpillars equals poor picture. The white fuzzy things are the caterpillars.


This is a picture of the very rare clearus dayus in Ohious. Low humidity, no haze, temperatures in the high 70s. Perfect.


I have to admit, after attempting to photograph spiders and their webs under poor lighting conditions while in a creek bed, I have all sorts of admiration for nature photographers. Because you have to have skill and good equipment and a lot of patience, as well as not having a cat tugging at the end of a leash.


This is what my mother always called a magic lily. It definitely should be called a magic lily here because of where it is growing...



...which is in the "back 40" of the campground where a decrepit old trailer is being stored. This single lonely lily is making a brave attempt to brighten up the surrounding weeds and rusting hulk of a trailer.


Last, but not least, for Kim and Luna--a Patches picture.