Road of Peas

This post has been created for the Circus of the Spineless for August. It is number XII, and will be hosted at Sunbeams From Cucumbers. The butterfly pictures, and the first dancing aquatic worm picture were previously posted at Middle-Fork.

I found this butterfly, along with dozens more like it, near a trail to Skipper Lakes. This is on a ridgeline at somthing just over 5000 feet, on the south side of the Calapooya Mountains, overlooking the Boulder Creek Wilderness, part of the North Umpqua River drainage. There were many hundreds of butterflies very much like this one, but twice as large. The larger variety flitted away if I came within ten feet. The smaller ones ignored me, and fed away.

The Dancing Aquatic Worm was wiggling around over the crestline of the Calapooya Mountains and down on Staley Creek (which was once called the South Fork of the Middle Fork WIllamette.) There are some fine carved rock channels here. Two weeks ago I found an orange frog, which thrilled my boss, who had spent a few years researching chromatophores.

But, I’d seen frogs before.

This worm is something else entrely. As the creek flow dwindles, it leaves ponds behind. The worm was in a still water pond, and was constantly twisting and flexing. Every few seconds it touched the surface, perhaps to breath, but it may have been accidental, as it also bumped a couple water stiders, which did what they do best, and skedaddled.

UPDATE 23 Aug 2006: I made an exploratory plunge into little lake country to see how the mosquitoes were doing. There are quite a few close to the lakes, but by keeping my distance, I managed to avoid most of their attention. This is good; they will be gone soon. Not my favorite invertebrae.

But this critter! Wow! I think it’s my favorite. It looks like a common garden spider all dressed up for Gilbert and Sullivan. It was sitting in the sun, busy working on its web, 5 feet in the air and 20 feet from its anchor trees, and swinging wildly back and forth in the wind. It ignored me completely from this side of the web, but as soon as I walked wide around to the other side, it popped right into threat posture.

I had a lot a fun with polaroids way back when, but nowadays, a dollar a shot is mind boggling, especially considering that I bring home five or six hundred essentially free exposures everytime I head out into the forest. In addition, they seem very much like polaroids, quickly convertable to raw material for further creations.

Bu oboy they were fun at the time! I took a few dozern hand pictures to create this collage. The black background is a blank book. I use them for my journals.

The Show of Hnads has bene hotlinked in a music fan forum at panicfreask.org by Vacation214

…and this is odd. I registered at panicfeask.org to see the forum in which the Show of Hands appeared, and usually that is sufficient to then go look at people’s profiles. I see now that I registered at the sandbox, and Vacation214’s profile is at the vBulletin forum, at the same domain. I need to scoot out into the forest to catch the light right around noon, so I don’t have time to properly link up this post. I’ll do that tomorrow.

But meanwhile, the Show of Hands is in repsonse to a question as to hwo while show up at the Fox tonight.

Thanks Vacation214!

PS: The spam is coming hot and heavy this morning, usually this means a bunch of new hotlinks from MySpace. I haven’t seen them scroll by in teh access_log yet, but really, how many MySpaceCadets are up at this time in the morning, on Saturday.

Lady and Houdini Out Rolling Around. Everyone has to roll in something, I guess. I think I’m with Lady on this one.

This week, she’s getting spiffed up and hitting the books, in preparation for that durable stratum of the extensive league of webagnomes shaking the firmament with a down home beat. That would be Friday Ark 99 rhythmically expounded at Modulator

The gravity of the situation grumbles from within. Kitties know that humans will feed them randomly in response to obsessive attention. Unfortunately, our dear friend in the Austra regions seems to be off her diet. I hope all is well. All the kitties send prays and best wishes to eatstuff, where many weekends one finds a marvelous Weekend Cat Blogging event. And food. The kitties like the food.

This week, Blog d’Ellison hosts the 125th Carnival of the Cats. The host is a veteran, with many fine cat herding adventures under his belt, so to speak, so hang in there, and it’ll all be just purring along. Come Sunday Sunday Sunday.

My slugs and snails keep on trucking, this time as a triple header of slime trails leading right into a deep dark hole at MySpace. Usually these little critters show up as illustrations of bad dates or some as some friendly teasing by those with privileges. But who knows? No one that’s not an acknowledged friend of PATTY, who claims to be Female, 16 years old, LAOS, WASHINGTON, United States.

I built some posters about seeing Cambodia in your backyard, oh, once upon a time. I know Stonehedge is really in Washington, not way across the turf and pond - so why not Laos?

I bet it would fit. Its too early to go fetch statistics.