Though we were tired, Sweetie and I took a nice hike on some Lorain County Metroparks trails we'd never visited before. It was a marvelous experience! The trail –and we didn't walk the entire distance– covered environments ranging from hillside woods and flat forest, through wetlands, along a river bank, and into a meadow dotted with blue bird nest boxes. Weather was partly cloudy and very pleasant for walking. We shot many photos (I'm generally not happy with mine for several technical reasons), saw a spider that had to be two inches (yikes!) across, watched a long black snake sunning himself, heard the amazing song of a Baltimore oriole, and enjoyed seeing a wide variety of plant life. While we saw a bluebird perched atop a bluebird box, we saw a wren exit that nesting place, later saw a swallow perched atop a different nest box and photographed it. Excellent afternoon! After dinner, She fell asleep on the couch while I sat beside her and watched live coverage of the Mars Phoenix spacecraft landing operation. So very pleased to see it was a text-book flight and shared in the joy the mission team expressed. I was even able to see first images, via the Web, before heading off to bed. Great way to end the day for this "space cadet."
Today, Monday, Memorial Day, looks to be rainy, mostly gray, and quiet. That's good. No plans. We'll see what develops but we could use a quiet day, I think. I'll do some prep for a meeting I have with college staffers tomorrow. The meeting concerns a proposal by an outside group to build an observatory on college property. As in everything, there will be costs and benefits.
This sounds like a wonderful walk – we don't see many birds here! 🙂 A two inch spider? We have a few of those in Australia – some of our most deadly things are "small".
Yeah, we don't see many big spiders like this one either! I'm not sure I've ever seen one like this in the wild. And I'm happy about that. We left the creepy crawler in place after shooting some pictures. My photos weren't much good but my wife's were very good… though you can't get a sense of scale from any of 'em.– JG