Happy Thanksgiving!

We continue to start every Thanksgiving with breakfast, Peanuts style. I'm completely OK with jelly beans at 9am--once a year, anyway.

Happy Thankgiving!

Summer round-up/photography, 11/22/14

A few more picture-stories I didn't finish telling when it actually WAS summer...

Garden
We had a pretty good summer garden this year! I'd planned to have a cool-weather garden for the first time, too, and went as far as buying seeds, but there was no chance to get it done during the fall planting window. Next year, maybe. That's the nice thing about a seasonal garden, there's always another chance to get it right.

We'll definitely plant these tomatoes again. They're yellow when ripe, look like tiny pears. And talk about prolific! There was just one plant of this variety, and we got a good handful every day June through August.

Impressive size, right? Unfortunately, these Mr. Stripey tomatoes never reached ripeness, not a single one. They all either outweighed their stems and fell off and burst, or got eaten from the bottom up by insects while they were still green.

Hidatsa red beans growing up the trellis

bear paw popcorn

Most of the ears didn't reach full size, but this one was close. See now why it's called "bear paw"?

more popcorn. A typical ear from one side...

...and typical flip side. We had a cool, wet summer and sopping wet fall, so mold was a lot bigger problem than usual. I didn't take a picture, but powdery mildew took every one of our melon vines from lush and healthy to dead in three days.

Still, what lived did very well!

 Okay, so these two are not garden pictures. But they're related!

3-bean (Hidatsa, lima, and Calypso) chili

Crunch!

Yard Critters

We had more frogs this year than I've ever seen before. The garden was full of them. They turned up hiding in the flip-flop bin on the porch. If you drove at night, you'd see them hopping out of the street in front of your headlights. A couple times, one or two hopped into the house when we opened the front door in the morning. And every night at dusk, half a dozen regulars would climb up the sliding glass door of our living room and let us watch them catch the insects that gathered. I suppose the fact we had so few mosquitoes this year is no coincidence!

Bloodsucker-eater, and photogenic, too!

This...

...and this are the same dragonfly a few seconds apart. The only difference was using the flash vs. turning it off. Weird effect!

By now you know I like taking dragonfly photos.

the real reason our birdfeeders are always empty

I'd read about this many times, but this was the first time I'd seen it in person. The green caterpillar is a tomato hornworm, and it's a voracious garden killer if it's uncontrolled. But it's not uncontrolled here. The white things attached to it are braconid wasp eggs. The wasps are parasitic and feed on the caterpillar from the inside out. Mother Nature is vicious!

another critter I had never seen before this point: a wheelbug, named for that gear-shaped thing on its back. It's considered a beneficial bug because it preys on destructive insects.

It also bites in defense, which is why I didn't dare get closer to show scale.

toad!

We get lots of swallowtails, but I'm almost never able to get close enough for photos.

 

Do you spot him? Almost every evening this summer, I could walk through the corn and count on seeing at least one keeping watch.

still not as big as the ones we used to get in our yard in Miami, but by far this is the largest grasshopper I've seen here. And I was frankly very glad to be on the inside of the screen. I know it's irrational, but I think they're kind of scary.

Trips
We took a few small local excursions throughout July and August.

to a big, big, big playground in a neighboring city

to pick blueberries in a church friend's big backyard patch

to a couple of livestock farms

to a friend's pool party

to the local splash park

Ordinary Fun
everyday moments around the house

Cat Whisperer

Garden Girl

Acrobat Boy

More photos in another catch-up post very soon!

Photography, 7/19/14 (sort of)

Here's the thing about working with two different computers, four different cameras, and a separate external backup drive: If you're not flawlessly disciplined about when and how you download every single picture, you have disorganized chaos in no time flat.

And so, as I was doing backups today, I turned up quite a few photos that should have been in my last photography post but had been saved somewhere else, so they weren't immediately accessible then.

More mixed spring/home/uncategorized candids

playing blocks

all cozy during our last snow in March

I call it tilling before planting the garden, but if you ask them, they're digging for dinosaur bones. Tomato, tomahto. Those black spots all over the photo are actually little clods of dirt they sent sailing through the air.

Lego fun

camellias, rain, and streaks of sticky greenish pollen everywhere

More from Easter

hot cross buns

after the egg hunt

More from the aquarium trip
These four were taken by T.

river otter

monitor

shark!!!

ray touch tank

A walk through the preserve in May

Boy 1 spotted this hard-shelled ground beetle, the biggest we've ever seen. I wish I'd thought to put something in there to show the scale. He's over two inches long.

 

Some fixes from July reunion trip
I mentioned last time that a few of my many trip pictures threw an error when I downloaded. I kept getting a "This image cannot be saved." Well, that sounded like a challenge. For some reason, opening them in GIMP first, then exporting back into regular jpg files, did the trick. They don't argue about being saved anywhere I tell them to now...including here.

T and his sibs

cousins, first and once-removeds. Look how the babies are staring each other down.

the M grandchildren

Weird perspective
Here are photos I took (A), paired with photos of me while taking them (B). There's just something so strange about that.

A: You've seen this room before, in this post's field trip photos.

B: simultaneously taken by T

A: This one's familiar, too, from this other post.

B: simultaneously taken by one of our first grade teachers

The quirky files are fixed, the missing photos have been shared here, all photos from all sources now are neatly filed where they should be, and the backups are done. Sigh of relief.

I give this superb digital organization a week, tops.