Lunch with the new neighbor

I went back out around noon to find Sunny missing from her web and the white spider happily welcoming some very unhappy critter to his (her?) web. I think it's a fly -- you can sort of see a wing in the green-background photo below. I came out while the white spider was busily preparing it for lunch. The web has a few good rips, but the spider doesn't seem to mind. I imagine it doing the equivalent of spider whistling while s/he works.




For what it's worth, the camera for all of these & most of the rest is a Panasonic DMC-FX07. Some of the shots in the other blog entries may have been taken with my Olympus C-50. The Olympus has a little more in the way of manual adjustments for f-stops, etc., but it's a bit older & has been dropped a few times, so it has "issues." I don't use the digital zoom on these cameras, so everything you see here is max 3x zoom.... so yes, I'm really close to the spiders.

More spiders

The morning visit with the new arachnid neighbor turned up the exciting development that there are, in fact, two new neighbors: the yellow one with the enormous web across the sidewalk (photo, right), and a white one with a smaller, more subdued web up near the roofline (photo, below). By "smaller" I mean it's only about 1 foot across. (The web, not the spider, heh!)

I've been shooting my new neighbors since dawn-ish and have discovered that my cheap, compact tripod is not quite up to the task of capturing spiders that live more than 4 feet off the ground. However, that's the beauty of digital photography: You can shoot 200 images, delete 190 of them and still feel good about your "skill."

A professional photographer friend of mine says he hates digital photography for that reason. Once upon a time, an amateur had almost no chance of getting a good shot because they were always afraid of wasting film. Now... I can shoot more than 1,000 6-megapixel images onto my 4-GB memory card. So what if I shoot 25 pictures of the same spider? Surely, one will be in focus! And I might actually get a well-framed shot by accident!

(at right, the yellow spider's web across the front walk) Anyway, I was out there this morning shooting close-up portraits of the yellow spider (named Sunny after my car, for her charming disposition and her big smiles for the camera), with the camera on the tripod about 3 inches from the web. I was merrily snapping along when a wasp hit the web and scared the daylights out of me. Sunny was not happy at the intrusion either, as I think the web is made to capture smaller prey, like mosquitos (which is why I like having it there!) It was one of those "little seen in nature" events and it didn't take long enough to get the camera re-focused -- the wasp got away cleanly (perhaps with a bit of a fright), and the web was no worse for wear.


(Above, the backside of the yellow spider) My human neighbor came out in the yard later, and mentioned having seen us in the front yard the night before. I explained about my new pets (heh) and he came over to take a look. He is not a big fan of spiders, having walked into too many such webs strug across his own front walk. (Been there, done that. You wonder for days afterward whether you still have a spider living in your hair...) But he admitted he'd never noticed how beautiful the webs are, and said he appreciated my letting him meet the new neighbors -- from a distance. And he was glad they are at *my* house rather than his. Heh!

I shot a gazillion photos, and I put the best of them on Shutterfly. (below, yellow spider's web from the back, showing the "warning stripes" at the edges of the web -- the curved "dotted line" on the right side. According to one of the Web sites I read last night, the warning stripes may be designed to keep birds from smacking the web and tearing it to smithereens.)

New neighbor

A couple of families have moved into the rental houses on my street, but the coolest new neighbor lives in my own yard. A member of gasteracantha cancriformis seems to have built a new living space across my front walkway, which may or may not be the best idea s/he ever had.

G. cancriformis, as you may guess, is a spider. The "cancri" part of its name comes from the fact that the spider has what appears to be a 'crab' body. I know this because mom & dad & I went out to photograph the spider & its enormous web earlier this evening with little success. It was dark, and we're not exactly professionals at this. (I'll try again in the morning....)

The one photo that did sort of come out is shown above, a very close-up of the spider in the center of its amazing web. The web itself is a couple of feet across and dotted with brilliant white streaks. It's truly a work of art that I hope to be able to share.

Until I saw the photo all cropped for show & tell, I thought we were dealing with one of the much larger Texas banana spiders (Argiope aurantia), but those are much larger and scarier than this little guy/gal. Anyway, this one is plenty big enough.

I'll try in the morning for some better shots of the beautiful web. I picked up a few hints off the Web (Google: "how to photograph spider webs").

By the way, these spiders apparently come in a variety of colors. I'm not sure why this one has chosen to match my lovely yellow Mini heh

Tiny neighborhood, big excitement

There is nothing more guaranteed to generate excitement in an ex-reporter (that is, me) than coming home to see 37 sheriff cars at the corner of her little dead-end street.

My first instinct was that 37 cop cars was a bit "overkill" for one tiny out-of-date registration on the Mini Cooper. And I can explain that, anyway.

But no, it turns out another house on the corner had been vacant for some weeks this summer, and some clever local teen-agers found out that if one of them crawled in through the doggie door, they had a vacant house to party in to their heart's content. (Note to self: No matter how much the dog begs, we will never, ever have a doggie door.)

So, for several weeks, the local kiddies have been partying up a storm in the house. They might even be partying still, if they had not decided to hold some street races Saturday night (where was I, sleeping???), thus making a neighbor suspicious. The neighbor took license numbers, and called the sheriff, who sent a posse out to round up the brats.

I can't wait to hear the rest of the story. I got this much of the rumor in 2 minutes from one neighbor..... I am sure there are even better stories just waiting to be discovered!!

Shutterfly!

Because I have been a member over at Dogster (well, the dog has...), Shutterfly recently sent me a code for a free 8x10 memory book. You can build any book you want from your own photos, various different photo layouts, add captions, etc. It was fun and easy to build, even with all my special tweaks (they have a 'standard template' for a pets book, but of course I can't do anything the "standard" way.

Anyway, I got the book today in the mail -- it's great fun! For those of you who can't come & see the in-person thing, I'm told that you can view it online. I'm also told that you don't have to be a member of Shutterfly to look. [But if you are mom & dad, and you're only out of town for a couple of weeks, you should just wait and look at it when you can see the real hardcover book!!]

This is 100 times easier than real scrapbooking, but considerably less "creative" overall. Did I mention that I did the whole book in just a few hours? It usually takes me a few hours to do just one scrapbook page, by the time I'm done stamping, embellishing, journaling and all that nonsense. And I think I could embellish these pages just fine if I wanted to do all that work....

Oh yes, this is a fun thing!

To See or Not to See

I had Lasik some years ago on my left eye. As a child, I had a bit of a lazy eye -- the left one wandered a bit. As a result, the left eye was much weaker than the right, which was just slightly nearsighted. I wore glasses & contacts for years, and then I was convinced to try the laser surgery.

Unlike many people, I had a bad experience with it. I had terrible, awful dry eye after the procedure, and I never felt my vision was as good as it had been with glasses. This was partly the result of the dryness. The layer of fluid is a lens, of a sort. But it was never bad enough to go back to glasses or contact lenses -- just something to squint through.

Last year, I went to an ophthalmologist, who said that in his opinion, my vision was still not bad enough to warrant glasses. In addition, my nearsightedness has delayed the onset of presbyopia -- the need for bifocals. So I happily continued my squinting.

Well, I'm tired of squinting. So I went to a "therapeutic optometrist" today. I'm not sure how a "therapeutic optometrist" is different fom a plain old optometrist, but this place was on my insurance company's list of preferred vision care providers, so that's where I went.

If you haven't been to the eye doctor for a while, it's worth a trip just to see all the cool toys. Among the video games we played was one that measures your peripheral vision. You click a mouse every time you see a flash of light. After a while, you begin to wonder whether you're seeing new flashes of white light or ghosts from the previous flash of white light. Very fun. I wonder if they are measuring reaction time as much as they are measuring peripheral vision.... I didn't get a prize, but the nice young doc also didn't try to talk me out of driving home...

Anyway, the doc was a nice fella who said I don't need a very strong prescription, but he could certainly understand if I'm tired of squinting and particularly have trouble driving at night. (I actually don't have any more trouble driving at night than I do during the day, but then, I don't drive at night very often. The problem is reading street signs or anything else more than 3 feet from my face -- day or night.) Anyway he was sympathetic to my desire to see clearly at distance. He did warn me, however, that if I get glasses for distance, I should always take them off to read. He even showed me why. Very instructive.

And so the optical dispenser gals, a couple of cute 20-somethings with little nose pierces, helped me pick out some new driving & movie-watching glasses. (What's weird is that one had her pierce on the left nostril & one had it on the right. It felt wrong, like something was out of sync.) I believe they helped me pick out something stylish and yet not ridiculous for a person my age....

Now, we wait. Seven to 10 more days of squinting.

Drip, drip, drip

Went to dinner with mom & dad tonight at Macaroni Grill. Last time I was there, it was with visitors from Denmark, and they were not impressed. I'm guessing tonight was our last visit for another five years or so until mom forgets that we had dinner in the rain even though we were sitting inside....

Oh yes, it was raining outside, but the roof leaks. And the leaks dripped where? On our table. Or rather, on mom & I. All through dinner I kept noticing occasional water splooshes on my arm, but I didn't think anything of it. Then suddenly, mom pushes away from the table and says, "Are we done? Because I'm gettting wet."

Dad, being an extrovert, calls the waiter over to say, "You might want to let someone know that the roof is leaking here on this table." And the waiter (and then the Maitre'd) is dumb enough to say, "We know."

So.... they knew the roof leaked over that table, but they seated people there anyway? Brilliant. The stupid thing was admitting it. A smart person would have said, "Oh, really? Dang. I better tell a manager. Thanks for bringing that to our attention." Then you walk away, snickering, but you at least have done a public relations turn and appeared to be concerned about your patrons' comfort and (frankly) the sanitation standards of your business. Instead, they said, "Yeah, we knew you'd get dripped on all through your meal, and we know the drips go through the roof, the insulation, probablly all kinds of nasty roach poop and whatever, but we don't care because we already *got* your business."

I promised mom I would blog about the experience. Mom said, and I think she is brilliant, "I'll blog with my feet."

Dating update

A while back, I joined in one of the Internet's most painful trends: online dating. I tried two services -- Match.com and eHarmony.

Match.com is straightforward: Look at pictures, read about someone & decide whether to send an e-mail that the other person won't respond to (because they decided not to pay for the service). eHarmony purports to have a "scientific approach": They make you suffer through a long personality test & then match you with people who never respond (because they decided not to pay for the service).

For the three months I was a paying member of these illustrious services, I met two people worth dating. One petered out after a few dates because he did not know when to shut up. You see, guys, no matter how brilliant and all-knowing you may be, the woman you are with might -- just might -- know more than you about one tiny, itsy-bitsy small subject. If you refuse to acknowledge this, you are effectively kissing off your chance of a goodnight kiss. Or a handshake. It's called "respect." I'm pretty sure that word is still in the dictionary, but maybe I'm old-school.

The second petered out before we even met because, well, because he knew my ex. Go figure. My ex lives in New York. What are the odds that an engineer living in Houston metro, would know people I knew when I was married and living in upstate NY? Small world. I'm not sure what it says about my ability to avoid making the same mistakes over & over.

I still have my Match.com account, although I no longer pay for it, so I have 'hidden' myself so men don't fall hopelessly in lust only to be disappointed when they get no response (because you can only respond if you pay, and most "men" would not be worth $20 to exchange the two or three e-mails typically required to determine they are actually pigs). But Match.com still e-mails me once a week with "my matches."

Yesterday, for the first time, they matched me with someone from work. Someone totally, absolutely, impossibly wrong. In fairness, Match.com said he was only a 74% match. But still.

On a recent (May!) business trip, which I meant to blog, I dragged along a professional photographer to shoot a zillion pictures of my colleagues working in the field. It was a fun trip, and I still mean to write about it one of these days. But the relevant thing here is that the photographer, who is kind of cute and very fun, is also single and pointed out a FREE online dating site: Plenty Of Fish. So I signed up -- what the heck, right?

The thing about a free online dating site is that it's free. So there are all kinds of morons on there, including (I think -- I hope) 13-year-olds posing as 45-year-olds. If these men really are 45, there are a lot of reasons why they are divorced/separated/single. Example from a recent chat:

Man: Hi my name is Xxxxx.
Me: My brother's name is Xxxxx. You're not him are you? Because that would be really embarrassing.
Man: Ha no im not ur brother but r u feelin naughty?
Me:

(sigh) I mean, it's not even *video* chatting for heaven's sake.

Anyway, in two months of Fishing, I haven't caught anything worth keeping -- but hey, it's *free.* And I haven't given up yet.

Catching up (again)

1) I passed the class. The math was hard, but I made the world's most awesome spreadsheet to do all the calculations for me, so I was golden. How can it be that a person who is so very nervous about doing math can get such a high level of entertainment from writing super complex Excel equations? Go figure.

2) I went out into the field again last week and had a great time. I'll probably blog more about it one of these days....

3) It was 95 degrees and sunny when I left work today and 73 degrees and absolutely *pouring* rain when I got home. What a difference 13 miles makes. Naturally the top was down. I was a little damp when I pulled into the garage. Laughing my butt off, but damp (i.e., very wet) nonetheless.

Geeking out again

As I did last November, I'm taking an engineering course for work.

I should be doing my homework now, bu I'm writing about it instead. Good attitude, right? heh. Turns out the homework includes reading the first three chapters of a book written by a colleague who recently left the company. And I've read/written/edited on this technology in the past, so the reading is no problem. But I never had to actually *do* the calculations before, and I have this *thing* about math.

As with the first course I took, my classmates are mostly young, recent graduates of engineering programs. We have an interesting mix of engineers, which simply points to the shortage of qualified petroleum engineers. We have mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, manufacturing engineers, industrial engineers, civil engineers.... and me, of course.

I'm always the odd gal in these classes, first because I'm old enough to be my classmates' mom, and second because I'm not an engineer. There are two other gals in the class, both Americans (in contrast with the gals in my first class, one each from Russia & Colombia). The instructor already picked me out as the idiot... (sigh) I think it's the big hair, but it could be the "Corporate" in my job description. I am very worried about the math, so I don't mind, really. No, I lied. I hate to be labeled "big dummy from corporate" every time I walk into one of these classes. So ok I just have to keep proving myself. I can do that. I can do this. (repeat)

That said, we started the class with a pre-test, an embarrassing examination of what we already know about the subject at hand. Having read about it, I knew more than most, which isn't saying much. I had the second highest grade in the class, and I got a 33. That's why we're in the class, I suppose. But the pre-test was closed book, and the real tests will be open-book. I can do *anything* with an open book.

Anyway, on day 1, I have already learned 100 useful facts and concepts, so it's all good. More to come. I have to do homework now....