I have my shots

I feel like I am a dog when I say that I went with my parents to get our shots yesterday. (I would have blogged immediately afterward, but Blogger was down...)

In another 9 days, I will be immune from Yellow Fever, one of those nasty mosquito-borne diseases that you only have to worry about in tropical climes. Houston is, apparently, not tropical enough. But some parts of Brazil are, which is why mom, dad & I paddled up through the wet weather yesterday to get Yellow Fever vaccinations. They are not required for the places we are headed, but they have been recommended. So we got 'em.

Unlike some shots (I think the flu shot may be one) where the nurse tries to jab the needle deep into a muscle, the Yellow Fever shot is subcutaneous -- just under the skin. Or so the nurse said as she looked at me, the brave one, going first. "It will bubble a bit," she added.

"Bubble?" I asked as she stuck the needle just under the skin of my forearm and started pushing the plunger.

"Bubble" was the perfect word for it. It was like a ripple as the fluid was injected in there, ripping one layer of skin from whatever skin is attached to under there. And thus, it did not feel great. But it was cool to see, and I was busily letting my eyes keep my brain from noticing the pain when dad suddenly spoke.

"Did you *watch*?!" His voice was a mixture of surprise, horror and respect.

"Of course I watched. It was totally cool," I responded. "Was I not supposed to watch?"

Mom, next up, responded. "I can assure you that I'm not going to watch."

In fact, mom looked completely away and winced. "It huuuurts!"

"It's like a bee sting," I offered helpfully.

"Big damn bee," mom responded tersely.

Dad avers that it did not hurt at all. He did not, however, watch the bubbling. He claims that once the needle was in, he watched it all, but by the time he turned his head, it was all over. Ask the nurse. She'll tell you.

And it did *not* hurt that much. But it itches like a sun-of-a-gun now.

Is it me?

I'm struggling with the word "modest," myself. If you blog, can you really be said to be 'modest'?

Also, some 2/3 of all people who have visited the site have been paired with lions. Is this a statement about the kind of people who are on the "New Line Productions" e-mail list, or people who are interested in 'fantasy' type stories?

Edited: Hey, I just changed into a ferret!

Friends & Twits

So how's this for irony in the digital age: My first 'friend' on Facebook is a neighbor. Sorta. Well, he lives in The Woodlands and has a dog, so I've probably actually at least seen him at a dog park. Or walking the dog. Or not. Anyway, he founded the Facebook "Pet Owners of The Woodlands" group, and after I posted a picture of Lakrids on there, this fella 'friended' me. I feel so (sniff) friendly!

I also got 'poked' by a perfect stranger, which was worth a giggle. I poked her back. I hope that was the right thing to do heh.

My second friend is a real friend, albeit one from work and one who lives in Brazil. I wrote to him in Danish, saying my Danish is miles better than my Portuguese (I really gotta get back to those Rosetta Stone exercises before the Unnamed Male Relative's wedding in November.) My Brazilian friend doesn't speak Danish. So naturally, he wrote back in French. It's a fun world...

Meanwhile in real life, another friend from work (who happens to live in Kilgore, Texas) was in town yesterday to take a class, so we had dinner & the world's margaritas. He's the fella who -- oh my goodness, I never blogged about that adventure (#2 on this link). Briefly, he let me operate a piece of coveted machinery on a job site, which I will blog about another day. I giggled like a girl about being allowed to do this, and he & his cohorts were greatly amused. I've since made him famous in print, which made him smile.

All the while, people have been "tweeting" on Twitter. Feel free to call me a "twit" for falling into it, but it reminds me of the best part of old 1980s chatting, but even better -- because if you log off & go to sleep, all the messages from people overnight are there waiting for you in the morning.

It's a sickness. I think you either 'get' it or you don't. I'm not sure I 'get' it in the long term, but it's a giggle at the moment. There's something very amusing about the fact that my very first 'follower' was Robert Scoble.. If you don't know who that is, then you probably won't 'get' Twitter, anyway.

Old People in Social Media

Egged on by something I read on the Internet recently, I decided to try some Social Media sites. I had already joined myRagan.com, a Social Media site for people in the communications industry, but I read something last week about MySpace and Facebook being useful 'networking tools' for grown-ups. So I thought, what the heck.

Understand that I have been "networking" online since about 1984, when I ran the Chameleon BBS here in Houston and "networked" with friends from across the metropolitan area . I also "networked" with people around the country to develop new applications/code for the particular brand of BBS software we used on our Apple II computers. We all used 300-baud modems and dialup, when "online chat" was typing, without avatars, graphical smilies, video, audio or anything else. Many of us could type faster than our modems could send/receive the data for realtime chat, and for the BBSes, many of us could read messages as fast as the modems could retrieve data.

But it turns out I am old & have no clue about how these new networks "work." First, it appears (to an old fart like me) that 99% of the users on these things are under 30. Oddly, so was I back when I started online networking. But more importantly, none of them are people I know -- or maybe I just can't find the people I know. So I have no "friends," which is just (pout) pathetic.

In the real world, when you move to a new place, you join some groups of like-minded people and you "make friends." So I started that this weekend. Joined some "groups" to see what happens. I've heard/read stories about so-called "creepers" who "friend" anyone and everyone in an effort to appear popular. (And thus, the perfectly nice noun, friend, becomes a verb.) There is some debate about whether this is a horrible breach of etiquette or enthusiastic extraversion. Until I figure it out, I'm not "friending" anyone, even if I think I may know them. But I did "poke" someone I'm *sure* I know, but now I'm not sure that was wise -- but I don't know because I'm old & out of it. I feel a bit like my parents must have felt when I started online chats in the 1980s: "Why don't you just pick up the phone?"

Anyway, this is me on Facebook. If you're not on facebook, that link won't take you anywhere. If you are, but you're not a friend, I don't know what you will see: maybe everything, maybe nothing? (The dog refuses to log on & find out.) I also made a MySpace account but I'm not going to do anything with that right now.

So give me a .... poke? I don't really have any idea what I'm talking about here.

(Addendum: I also joined Twitter, which I really don't understand. It's like a global chat room... Very interesting...)

Neighborly update

The bad news: The rain destroyed Sunny's web, and she disappeared. The rain also did quite a number on the white spider's web. (I'm calling the white spider Luna.)

The good news: Luna rebuilt.

The bad news: It rained again.

The good news: Luna rebuilt again, and Sunny came back, but put her web in a different place (up in the trees, not quite as high as Luna's web, but also not across the sidewalk. And not as spectacular. I think Sunny is a bit depressed about the whole rebuilding thing.)

The even better news: There's a third one, another yellow face, in the backyard.

The worst news of all: I went to shoot a portrait of the new spider and felt a familiar, unpleasant tingle on my toes. It suggested the spider's new name: Queen Elizabeth. She is surrounded by palace guards, having built her throne directly over a fire ant mound. Ow ow ow ow ow.

Ain't nature great?

"Sunny" is back

Last one, I promise. A big thunder-boomer is about to smack the area. I'm afraid my new neighbors may lose their homes (cry).

Anyway, all this photography has been fun. It will be interesting (or sad) to see what the thunderstorm does to the webs. If the webs are destroyed, it will also be interesting (and fun) to see how long it takes for the spiders to rebuild (preferably not across the sidewalk...)

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!!