memories...

While selecting some shots for a photo competition, I happened upon photos from an excursion in October of 2008 with Anna and her kids. I pulled out the old CD with the shots on them - and realized some were never edited and/or put online. So, here's a look back at the past - a fantastic little trip to Pioneers Park with Anna, Cami and Calvin, & her camera :)

butterfly in the sky. I can go twice as high

These are the results from one frustrated evening of chasing monarch butterflies.

I went out behind my parents' house on gorgeous evening, and I swear there were at least eight butterflies sitting in a single view of a clover patch. They, having wings, however, did not want to sit still.

At one point I discovered they were grouping together, hanging upside down like they do in nature shows, from tree branches - very far away, but I tried to zoom in. The little things were SO ANNOYING... but even at a distance, as a nicely shaped black speck, they are inspiringly beautiful.

If you want to see my best shot of the hanging group, wait for the last shot! (about 9 pictures in all)

Thank you to God and butterflies for - existing :)

*** Two of the photos wouldn't show up correctly, so here they are.

new lesson

So the last three-ish days were several shades of awful. I came home for the weekend and realized one evening that I had forgotten to refill a certain prescription of mine. Oh well, I thought.

I enjoyed a nice meal with the fam - peach pie included - and went to bed feeling slightly sick. My brain filled with flashing images of the overly-long photo shoot I did that day, I - stayed up pretty much all night, excepting 2-3 hours. I drove back to the house, and spent the rest of that afternoon nauseated and exhausted - literally staring at details in my wallpaper. It got bad enough at 1 a.m. that I had my parents come pick me up and take me home again, where I weathered another day of the same until, finally, around 3:30, Mom came home with the blessed prescription. I hadn't eaten (or kept down) much of anything for about 2 days.

I had a hunch, the night my parents came to pick me up, that I should check out Google to see if my situation was at all pill-related. Google was replete with links warning you not to "abruptly stop" taking this drug, for "nausea, vomiting and sleeplessness" will occur. Exactly my symptoms. Lesson learned.

We worried that now I that I had the drug, whether I'd be able to keep it down, but by the grace of God (or something like it) I managed to and am back to a hesitant normalcy. I actually have energy to do things mentally like read, things requiring more staring at the wall. My stomach no longer feels like it has marbles in it. Yay hooray.

***

I told myself I was too sick of taking pictures to do any editing, but... can I help myself? No, not really. This is a little baby monarch caterpillar that was doing some serious chowing when I spotted it on a milkweed plant.



The plant had several stalks chewed to the nubs - so cute. There was a second, much much fatter caterpillar (like that rhythm - fatter caterpillar) chilling on a milkweed nearby - he never really moved and seemed unfazed by my presence, unlike the little guy who would hide. He really, really seemed to want to live. (Figuring how I spotted several monarch -butterflies- in that same area, it seemed he had some ground to catch up on!!)

Speaking of chewed plants...



The work of grasshoppers along the edge of our property. The whole tree, such as it was, was like that.

Here's some stuff from the nitty gritty, when I waded in a small pond (and thankfully nothing bit me):



So many drowned sunflowers in the water - seemed beautiful in a kind of morbid way. You think of Ophelia from Hamlet, committing suicide in a river, surrounded by flowers.





The second-to-last one is of the -reflection- of a normal sunflower in the water.

It really was fun - although I luckily spotted a medium-sized spider in his web to the side, and managed to get a good macro of another, muchmuch smaller one on a leaf. Teeming with life, as they say, and all that.

My leg in the sweltering pool (I don't know why sweltering - it just seemed like a good word):

That's probably enough for pictures. Ciao.

cat vs. printer

This is what I would like to do at work sometimes. (Although my printer is much louder.)

lotsa lotsa sunflowers

Though I move on to a different post, I still expect some kind soul to offer up an answer to my question in the previous.

These shots are from going home this last weekend and crawling in around huge sunflowers. I escaped bug-bitten-less and unscraped, which is more than I can say for most photographic ventures of the sort.

How can anyone dislike sunflowers? Even the name is sun + flower. Quite agreeable. So yay for all the blooming yellow out there now.