Today's walk report: 081814; Last weekend

Distracting myself from the pervasive moment, here's some stuff from the weekend of August 15-17.

The weather continues to aggravate with mid-upper 90º temps. It needs to go away.

Friday, 081514...

An A.M. walk, not that it helped much, quickly moving into the heat of the day. Docken and I stopped to look at a morning 1/2 moon and circling white doves.

Hoverfly on a salvia twig.

Gulf fritillary or passion butterfly (Agraulis vanillae)

A honey bee tussles in the stamen of a cactus flower.

Exploring the depths.

Cruising about.

Exit stage right.

One more time?

Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus), the conversation was with me. I hope I didn't say the wrong thing...

but perhaps I did...

Kalnachoe daigremontina.

Saturday... I don't remember what happened to Saturday.

Sunday, 081714...

Cooper's Hawk, Accipiter cooperii, in an olive tree.

Asclepias fascicularis.

Agraulis vanillae.

Another Selasphorus rufus, seemingly entertained by my presence.

Onto another distraction.

Today's walk report: 101113

Spiders from the moon.

You've heard of Spiders from Mars. Well...

Here's the deal. I tried. This was the shot. This is, of course, an image stack since one or the other subject would be horribly out of focus but this is what I was watching and yes, the spider was quite large. The sun was below the garden at this point so a good image of this spider was really impossible without a secondary light source. I was carrying an LED flashlight but this view was overhead, in the wind and I was having enough trouble just framing the spider. The spider was also moving rather quickly trying to get a web up. The shadows and midtones were pushed way down just to get her looking like this.

I need to get out much earlier these days. Sunset today was at 6:25. I found the spider about 5:50 and the sun was already well below the garden.

It looks like the Conejo Buckwheat is starting to bloom, which is something I don't remember from last year. Maybe this is just a few early risers.

Here's an image of the same plant from a w.r. back in May. This is a 9 image focus stack.

That's all I could come up with. I'll try and get out earlier tomorrow. Anyway, I had a nice walk.