Come at Me, Brah

Inspirational song: What Was I Thinking? (Dierks Bentley)

You may think I have been a total wuss about the spiders this year. I know, I totally let them win. I ran for cover and quit the battlefield. Today I got a little proof that I was wise to concede. The timing was right to go out and do what I hope is the last mow of the season. It was convenient to use the catcher on the mower as a vacuum as well. At least four times, maybe five, I caught myself at the last moment before charging right through spiderwebs that were most definitely occupied. I stopped to look at them, and carefully mowed around them. Three of the four made obvious aggressive moves. No, as I think back, there were four who thumped their webs at me. The big brown banana spider waved her big brown arm at me, in a motion of daring me to come closer to her web. A spiky disc of an orb weaver crawled across her web toward me, and swung out on an inch of silk in my direction. A tiny, dark, round bodied spider with an orange-red decal was glad when my attention was quickly diverted elsewhere. I'm not sure how I managed to mow the entire Park without getting bitten, but I appear to have escaped harm. I did leave three little stands of grass a foot or so across, where three orb weavers had anchored their homes.

I expressed my displeasure over the ongoing fighting out west today. I'm sure people wonder why we got separate condos, when most parents would have told their kids to share one at college. I definitely had to scale back my own housing expectations so that we could afford the two additional mortgages. I live in smaller, older homes than I would like to choose, so that my kids can live apart and never learn to resolve their differences. I'm beginning to see the flaw in our plan.

I had a closing paragraph to tie it all together. And then I got a phone call asking me to summarize three seasons of Person of Interest in a few sentences, to make it relevant to one scene, for my parents who were watching it for this first time. My brilliant, witty final argument has gone out the window. Maybe I just give it up, and quit the field. Here are today's pictures as a parting shot.