Category: Light

Lithobius forficatus

Timothy Price4 Comments

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It’s the time of year the sugar ants start prowling the kitchen for anything we have left unsealed. With the reemergence of sugar ants comes a lot of other insects, arthropods, myriapods and arachnids — what most people refer to as creepy crawlers — and with this reawakening of the “creepy crawlers” out comes my macro lens.

Today’s photo is of a Lithobius forficatus, commonly known as the stone centipede. We have lots of these 30 legged centipedes in the garden where they stir around in the soil mostly under rocks and wood eating lots of pests. One pest that centipedes eat are roly-polys or pill bugs, which are actually crustaceans. I don’t know of other predators in the garden that eat roly-polys. For those of you who are herpetophobic or ophidiophobic, larger centipedes will kill and eat small snakes and lizards. Centipedes also eat spiders and insects.

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The Black Widow

Timothy Price25 Comments

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“And here, my prize, the Black Widow. Isn’t she lovely?…And so deadly. Her kiss is fifteen times as poisonous as that of the rattlesnake. You see her venom is highly neurotoxic, which is to say that it attacks the central nervous system causing intense pain, profuse sweating, difficulty in breathing, loss of consciousness, violent convulsions and, finally…Death. You know what I think I love the most about her is her inborn need to dominate, possess. In fact, immediately after the consummation of her marriage to the smaller and weaker male of the species she kills and eats him…(laugh) oh, she is delicious…And I hope he was!”

Those words are part of Vincent Price’s introduction to “The Black Widow” on Alice Cooper’s 1975 album “Welcome to My Nightmare”.

While I was working on the gray water system this afternoon, I found a black widow where they like to be — in wet, humid areas — like the underside of the cover for the distribution hub for the gray water system. She seemed a little stunned  by her sudden exposure to the sunlight, and allowed me to do several photos of her underside from different angles; but then I got too close and she scampered under some of the mulch. While I was cleaning out the pipes, she ran out on the cover to dry herself after I apparently got her wet. She allowed me to do several macro shots from a top view while she was drying out; therefore, the series gives you a detailed look at Vincent’s prize “The Black Widow”.

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Up, Up and Away

Timothy Price5 Comments

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While hot air balloons are a common sight every fall in the Albuquerque area, this balloon flying over the house at sunrise on a very cold February morning was a surprise. Although, with the temperature inversions common to the area, the temperature might have been warmer 200 feet above me where the balloon was than where I was standing photographing it.

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Wet Spot

Timothy Price7 Comments

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There was a wet spot on the carpet in the office this morning, but no signs of a leak in the ceiling. As the wet spot spread, we finally pulled up the carpet to find a combination of plaster, spackling, and 1/4 in masonite on the slab. I started pulling up the wet masonite and chipping up the moist spackling and discovered a 2 inch piece of pine that had been cut into a circle to cover a drain in the floor. We were speculating a sewer line froze and water backed up through the old drain, but then we noticed that while the top of the pine was soaking wet, the underside of the pine was dry, which suggested that the water did not come up through the old drain. I continued to chip back the plaster and spackling until I found dry edges all around the wet spot. The source of the water remains a mystery among puzzling evidence, but we’ll see if we have standing water on the chipped up floor in the morning.

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RX-8 on Ice

Timothy Price9 Comments

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We had a light snow most of the day, which left a dusting of snow on top of a hardened layer of thin ice that was not much fun to scrape off the windshield and windows. After 40 minutes on the road, I stopped at the post office in Corrales to pick up the mail, and noticed that the ice and snow stuck on the hood was only a little wind-streaked.

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Cat Help in the Catio

Timothy Price16 Comments

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Work continues on the catio. We started preparing the old cement slab for resurfacing on Saturday, but then we discovered we needed to rent a high pressure sprayer to clean it before we put on the resurfacing cement, plus the temperatures are supposed to stay above 50º F for 8 hours after the new surface is applied. Since the temperature only got into the 40’s over the weekend we decided to prepare surfaces for painting.

The first photo is Laurie preparing to wire brush the French windows so I could paint them. In the second photo, she is telling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern what they could do to help. The third photo shows Guildenstern supervising Laurie. He had a lot to say about our work, so much so, that it wore him out and he had to take a break (fourth photo). The French windows and door had not been painted in 22 years. The ivy had grown up on them which marked and pulled off paint in various places, so I spent a good part of the day painting the windows and doors with a very good, “stain killer” primer. The last photo shows Laurie standing by the freshly primed windows.

As I have mentioned before, we live in a cold spot — the reason Laurie was dressed in layers of warm clothes to work on the catio. We went to a dinner party last night in Albuquerque. When we left the party at a little after 10:00 PM, the car showed the outside temperature was 47º F. When we got home 20 minutes later, the temperature at our house was 26º F. We live about 10 miles north and west as the crow flies, and about 700 feet lower than the part of Albuquerque we attended the dinner party, yet we were 21degrees colder.

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