So here is a pic of the lit up Santa in the front yard.
http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts?date=2013#vm=trendingchart&cid=zg2640&geo=US&date=2013&cat=
Seems my blog is not in the top ten this year. Surely it was close. Maybe next year.
My family was recently invited for an overnight stay. It is Christmas time and all that, so such happens and a great time was had. And, holiday pics aren't my usual photographic bits, yet I still wanted to put up a blog post. So here is a pic of the lit up Santa in the front yard. Looks like Santa has been down one too many chimneys and his face is full of soot. This is a photo artifact, not what the thing looks like. However, I am actually in favor of a darker skinned Santa, as Saint Nicholas himself, the dude Santa is based on, was from the general area of Turkey and probably had darker skin, but this just looks likes he needs a shower after so many chimneys. And a stat from Google.
http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts?date=2013#vm=trendingchart&cid=zg2640&geo=US&date=2013&cat= Seems my blog is not in the top ten this year. Surely it was close. Maybe next year.
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These spiders have their spiderlings ride on their back for a bit. It gives a bit of an uncomfortable image for those who don't like spiders. But it is a great bit showing that there is child care even among spiders. Photos from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania
And thus I provide three pics mostly without IDs. And that is that for this blog post, because I had a tech failure tonight that made getting even this bit up time-consuming.
I have a lot of pics of spiders from Borneo. Sadly, I don't really have any good way to identify them. So here is one cool critter that I can't say what it is.
Some years ago, I did quite a bit of caving in Panama. One of the caves discovered was Ol' Bank Underworld. We surveyed over a kilometer of passage, and to this day there are still good leads to extend the cave further. After surveying the main stream trunk, we went into an upper level passage that takes water during flood events not too far from the downstream sump. We thought it would be a bypass to the sump, but it went elsewhere. There were a lot of white formations and it was named the White Way, even though anyone going that way got pretty brown with all the mud on the floor in a couple places. The White Way ended at a long lake (only diving might find a continuation here), and we encountered this fine tarantula. Usually I can handle these things pretty easily, but this guy was cranky and hungry, and nearly got a bite in on me when I grabbed it.
And while thinking of Scotland, there is Stirling Castle. It has a website at: http://www.stirlingcastle.gov.uk/ The history is rich, the castle is awesome, but one of the pictures I came away with that hit a chord is this one... To me, it seems like they no longer have enough raiding hordes to keep their defense positions free of cobwebs. I am quite certain that this is a good thing, so we shall give them a pass on the spider webs.
This summer there are a number of student science projects going on at the FCRE, plus the random stuff that needs done. Or, at times, just something that piques the curiosity and is worth a look at (see the last couple pics for one such amusing thing). First up is Devyn and the photo-trapping project. She has set up arrays of trail cams to study the movements of animals on the property. And finally, a project that only just came up on this trip. We were surveying a stream on the property, and it ended at a spring. That is not so unusual. But this area had some soil piping (soil moving underground) and at the upper end of such things there was a small hole. It was about 8-feet deep, had a small stream at the bottom, and the entrance was just barely big enough for Don McFarlane to actually fit in it. We needed to find out if there were passages going off from the bottom of the little pit. Soooooo... |
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September 2021
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