That is the question: is this a bee or a fly that looks like a bee?  This is the first time I’ve ever seen one. Its body is like a bee; its wings are like a wasp’s, and its eyes and feet are like a fly’s. It’s hairy like a bumblebee, but is the size of a honeybee. I looked for it on the Internet, but didn’t find it.

As things-breaking continues, I need to replace the faucet on the kitchen sink and the battery in the truck. I’m getting tired of fixing things.

I walked in the bosque and visited the river tonight — the first time since they closed it in June. The thunderheads were building up nicely over the Sandias; I came across a grasshopper with marking like a python, although it’s probably called a leopard grasshopper. The water was black from the runoff in the burned areas up north, a boll weevil worked on a thistle, and a yellow weed showed it self more prominently than the other wild flowers blooming in the bosque this evening.

A great horned owl landed on the top of the telephone pole that’s on the edge of the garden this evening. I could see its outline from the deck, and it allowed me to shine a flashlight on it from a distance, but when I got close enough to photograph it by the light of the flashlight, that was too much for it and it took off before I could snap a photo.

The rain has been great, especially since I’ve been getting home late every night, making it hard to remember to run the drip systems.

The server is back in full production.  We hadn’t had the server back on line for ten minutes before it was under attack from hackers in Germany and Turkey trying to break into it.   These people need to get a life.

I came across this toad in the road, in the rain on the way home tonight. I stopped to get it out of the road so it wouldn’t get run over, and had to photograph it.  I got home late tonight. I finally got all the databases restored today, and we have the server back up. We need to do a little more configuration and testing, do a final transfer of the databases, and we can bring it back into production. We still don’t know what caused the failure, but we changed the drive configuration on the new drives, and enhanced the backup system, to try and minimize another failure of this type.

I had plans of doing more light box photos tonight, but the water line on the toilet cracked at a joint, so there was water all over the floor of the bathroom when I got home; therefore, I spent time I planned doing photos fixing the water line on the toilet.

 

Here are closer views of a red dragonfly for your viewing pleasure.

The damselflies, dragonflies and hummingbirds were out in force early this morning. They all like the irrigation water, and swarm, play and chase each other around. The dragonflies like to hover over the water and dip their tails in it. I could seen these little ringed ripples in the water, similar to when fish catch insects on the water’s surface, but since I knew there wasn’t fish in it, I had to look really closely to see an almost perfectly camouflaged dragonfly flying over the water dipping its tail in it.

This damselfly drew my attention and allowed me to get within about 2 inches of it with my macro lens. Through the lens I could see it had something in its mouth. After a closer look I could see it had a tiny winged ant. I didn’t know damselflies ate ants. Turns out I had my arm in the ant pile it was plucking ants from, while photographing it. After I got up I felt some biting me, looked at my arm and there were several hundred tiny black ants crawling on me and a couple had taken to biting me. Fortunately, tiny black ant bites are not like big red and black ant stings.

Carry Grant cut quite a figure, backlit by the early morning sun.

The hummingbirds were frisky, and to expose them properly against the early morning back lighting, the colors came out very soft and pastel. I am really happy with the results. There were two of them playing and chasing each other around, but I could not get both of them in focus at the same time.

I went out later in the afternoon, and the dragonflies where having a fiesta. Irrigation water was still standing in the meadow where they were playing, so I had to wade out to them. There were four different types of dragonflies at their fiesta, but only a couple let me get very close to them. One of the red dragonflies let me stick my macro lens in its face, and I got some really close photos. I didn’t have time to finish processing those photos, so I’ll include them later.

The yellow dragonfly in tonight’s set of photos would not let me near it with my macro lens, but it let me get to with in three feet of it with Le Long Lens. I got involved in working its photos because it had a very expressive face, and it’s a color I hadn’t photographed before.

I built a simple light box to photograph flowers, fruit and anything that’s translucent with a strong backlight, yet exposed well on the surface. The pinwheel is half dried hibiscus I unfurled.  Stretch was lying on my light box tonight but I didn’t get a chance to photograph him to see how he would come out.

I got the tail end of the sunset on my way home from what has been a very rough week. Tomorrow will be the start of a great week.

Got most everything restored on another server today. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.