A Week at the Holler In Pictures

Gratuitous nature photography:

The Estimable Pearson boys... and Amish laundry.

Common Blue Butterfly

This is called Blue Eyed Grass. Isn't it adorable?

Meadowhawk dragonfly rests on Charlie's shorts.

 Below and to the right, my fence post rose is behemoth this year.

Above Left: Abraham calls these "itties" and it is a miracle any of them have learned to walk, as much as both boys like to carry them around.

Potato Beetle is not very adept at hiding on my flip-flop.

Cardinal eyes me to decide if I'm a threat before visiting the feeder.

Some kind of Angle-Winged Butterfly, Comma variety, just hanging out.

Red Admiral butterfly is such a poser. And don't I have cute elbows?

Rough-fruited Cinquefoil... why do botonists give things such arduous names?

Star Chickweed.

Heaven is going to be a grassy meadow full of little boys running around in daisies.

Opportunistic moss on my wash line pole.

Proof that fairies are cliff-dwellers.

Butterfly says, "I am a piece of debris. Quit looking at me!"

Kitten laughs at feeble human's attempts to catch him.

Fritillary resting in the road.

Six-spotted Tiger Beetle is very pretty, and very very fast. I got sooooo lucky when I shot this picture.

Deptford Pink (Wild Dianthus) peeks out from under Milkweed.

Like falling off a log...

Cabbage butterfly meets untimely end, but what a cool pose!

Charlie caught a pond frog (and then another and then another) at Robert and Linda's Red Roof Inn, then decided it would like to live in a hanging fern. Evidently, he was right.

Toad says, "Do you ever get the feeling you're being watched?"

Owlet Moth has gorgeous mahogany colored wings.

Virgin Tiger Moth likes to have his picture taken.

Holy cow! Have you ever seen the movie Pitch Black? Plume Moth will eat your soul...

Walnut Sphynx came to visit me at the kitchen window when I was doing dishes at 2 AM.

Good night from the Holler. Every day here is a sweet dream.

A-typical Friday

Last Friday, the library was closed for a staff day so that we could all go to a conference. What I took home from the conference was this:
1. Library Conference = Practical Shoe Convention.
2. Too many women stuck in a community college on a rainy day is an automatic recipe for snarkiness.
3. Poet Laureate or not, never extemporize your opening remarks to a room full of librarians.
4. You can do more with Google than search the internet.
5. Friday, May 21, 2010 was Pacman's thirtieth anniversary.
6. Great Blue Herons will not stick around if you aren't very very stealthy when sneaking up on them.
7. Even librarians will think you're a dork if you're taking pictures of bushes during break.

But I wasn't taking pictures of bushes. I was taking a picture of this really elegant little moth! This is a Pale Beauty. Well, okay, when I started out, I was taking pictures of this bush with tiny white flowers, but if I hadn't been, I never would've seen the moth, so I feel justified.

Anyway, also during break I saw what I could swear was a Great Blue Heron land in the college's run-off pond. I immediately soaked my loafers running through the grass to go see him up close. Just as I got close enough for the picture, he saw me and went flapping lazily away. *Pout* I was also unable to get a picture of the very unafraid but very good at hiding orangey yellow bird that was so not a Goldfinch. I chased that sucker around for fifteen minutes, just to cement my oddity in all my fellow librarians' minds. My best guess so far is that it was some sort of warbler or a female oriole, but the world will never know...

"What the heck is that bit about PacMan?" you ask. During one of my training sessions, which was being conducted via webinar (we are SO 2010) the presenters got all discombobulated because they were trying to show us something on Google and all these PacMan sound effects started playing and they couldn't figure out how to turn them off. Why? Because the Google Doodle for the day was an interactive PacMan in honor of PacMan's 30th birthday. Ha ha ha... millions lost to a Google Doodle! By the by, if you are a chronic link skipper, you should really clicky that last one. It's interesting and funny. You really can do more with Google than search the internet... They're called Google Apps, and all you have to do is click that little word "more" at the top of the screen to find them. Who knew!? (Shut up, Joel.) But the Google Apps session wasn't nearly as interesting as the Google Doodle session...

Do you really want me to recount how many times Kentucky's Poet Laureate said, "Um-uh" in a five minute speech? You'll be asleep faster than I was... And the less said about snarky librarians, the better, I think. Although that does conjure a delightful mental picture of women in tweed shushing and smacking each other... For "Practical Shoe Convention," see line about loafers getting wet and multiply it by 100. Oh, a good time was had by all.

After all that, I thought it would be fun to take the boys to Newport to walk our feet off. On Friday nights, we often go to Newport to "dance" to the free music on the patio at Newport on the Levee, but the concert had been rained out. So we wandered instead, as we often do, and found things to photograph. The Ohio River was high, and that made the urbanite critters` restless, I think. I saw what looked like two beavers, but they were not in the mood to have their pictures taken. Ambitious beavers... the Ohio River? Where would you get enough twigs for that dam?

Anyway, we walked down by the water and played...

Duck, duck.... Goose!  (Oh, come on! That was funny.)

We crossed the "Purple People Bridge" to the Ohio side...

and strolled in the Riverfront Park. We even dipped our toes in where the steps of Yeatman's Cove meet the water. Our toes have not fallen off yet, but they have begun to grow this fungus that glows the most amazing shade of bougainvillea... Speaking of bougainvillea, it's a flower, isn't it? Here is Charlie amongst the flowers. He's holding a green rock he found. It's the little things, you know?

(Yeesh, he looks like I just fed him three double chocolate chip cookies and an espresso...

It was only two cookies, thank you very much, and he didn't like the espresso!)

After all of that, I have drawn one sweeping conclusion:

It is not wise to walk all over the riverfront with a twenty five pound toddler and no stroller.

Words to live by...

Can You Really Call That A Nature Walk?

When you take two kids, a grandma, and a camera for a stroll down a country road, can you really call that a nature walk? We identified critters and flowers and enough Poison Ivy to set an elephant back for a month. We walked in the creek/run-off ditch and even found a Crayfish (Crawdad?) claw. So that's a nature walk, right?

This Golden-backed Snipe Fly was happy to pose for me. Kudos to Mom for spotting him. I bet you never thought you'd find a fly pretty.

I'm told this is called a Painted Lady butterfly. It, along with several Zebra Swallowtails, Black Swallowtails, and something else orange were enjoying the sunshine and Japanese Honeysuckle at the side of the road. To the left is a toadstool that was clearly happy about all the rain we've been having in the last few weeks.

In a hillside field, we found about a hundred of these daisies, each with a shiny little black beetle basking on top. It must've been our day for picturesque bugs.

This is a new May flower for Mark Haley. I haven't positively identified it yet, but it may be "Purple Rocket." It looked a lot more purple than my camera gave it credit for.

I know, I take pictures of weird things. But this tiny, fuzzy leaf was just so... dare I say it? Cute!

And at the end of the road, we messed about in the creek.

Charlie. I think he was River-dancing. Oh, come on, that was funny.

Grandma and Abraham up on the bridge where the sensible people stay.

Grandma spotted this cool rock. Yes, it really is a rock and not a slab of concrete that had been poured over roots. Yes, I did take it home to put in my flower bed. Yes, the person waiting to turn onto the road while I was parked at the end of it retrieving a rock thought I was 'round the twist.

This is the view from where the... well, not the sidewalk, because there isn't one... ends.

Down the road apiece...

Charlie watching the rainwater flow to the creek.

Dame's Rocket and Multiflora Rose by Richland Creek.

Brown butterfly on the Wild Blackberry at Butch's pond.

 Common Whitetail Dragonfly spotted by Butch's pond. I didn't take this picture, though. Picture courtesy of Ferd on What's That Bug? I think that the dragonfly to the right who was hanging out on my trealise is a female of this species.

Left: I'm still not sure what this flower is. Some kind of Lobellia is my best guess, but in all the books, Lobellia's flowers point up, and these hang down... Right: Virginia Waterleaf picture taken along the drive back to the farm at the absolute end of the road. They have the coolest wildflowers!

 

This has got to be from the Pea family, but I can't find it in any book. Bueller? Bueller?

How can anything this pretty be called Philadelphia Fleabane?

In and around the Holler...

Every Year, this Eastern Phoebe (or her offspring?) comes to nest on our track lighting. If it weren't for the fire hazard, I'd have no objection. She's very polite about not poo-ing everywhere, even when we make her nervous by loitering under her babies trying to take pictures. I believe I can categorically say that in the baby world, nothing is as ugly as a baby bird. Evolutionarily speaking (as if I believed such things), aren't all babies supposed to be cute in such a way as to provoke the protective instincts of their parents to the strongest degree? Hey, Darwin, something went seriously wrong! Poor Darwin... he didn't actually believe in modern evolutionary theory, and yet he gets hammered with it all the time.

Proof that God loves us: He put hearts all over the place for childlike souls to find.The heart shaped leaves here are Wild Ginger happily growing in the woods along what we call the river cliff. Under the leaves, at the joint of two stems, there is a hairy, red-brown triangular flower hiding. I wonder what pollenates this: Beetles?

Box turtles must have terrible lives. They are constantly trying to off themselves on the road. I moved this one off to the side where he could sun himself safely, but don't expect him to be happy about it.

Once again proving that slimy can be cute, check out this little frog Charlie found in the grass.

We gave him his freedom in the Jade Plant.