I hadn’t seen this dragonfly before. If you think dragonflies are six legged sissies, fluttering about like four winged fairies — think again. This one’s sporting a bleached mohawk and yellow tattoos. He’s one bad dude of a dragonfly who stood his ground against a macro lens.
I sheet rocked in the darkroom Sunday. I turned out to quite frustrating and painful at times, mostly because the heads of the sheet rock screws strip easily. I couldn’t find a bit that seated well into the screw head, which made the bit want to slip off the screw head, so I ended up unintentionally driving the bit into my fingers and palms of my hands more than once. Over the past several weekends, I got water into the darkroom, ran electrical, and put in a light. Laurie came up with the title, because she said all the noise from screw heads striping and me yelling about a resulting injury, unintended hole in the wall or broken piece of sheet rock, sounded like the wall was winning. I took Laurie into the dark-side of the newly sheet rocked darkroom to check it out, and as I swung the portal door around she said “I can’t see a damn thing!” It is dark inside, so I think I’ll go “soccer” on it and call it a tie!
This hummingbird flew up and hovered in front of me, I got it in focus, but it started flying off just as I released the shutter, moving out of the narrow focal plane.
I got a flat tire on the truck, put on the spare and drove the flat tire to Discount Tires to see if they could repair it. Even though the tire didn’t have much wear, it was over 10 years old, so he said by law he couldn’t touch it. A guy from the Midas shop next door walked by and said, I think I have some used tires that will fit. He didn’t have any 225/15s, but he had a pair 235/15s, which are a bit bigger. For $30 he mounted and balanced the two 235/15 tires, and put them on the back of the truck, and then he out the two better tires of the 3 remaining originals on the front. That was quite a deal, since the lowest price set of four new tires for the truck would run about $400, and since I don’t drive the truck very often, I didn’t want to put a new set of tires on it right now.
After a morning run and repairing one of the drip systems this morning, to getting tires replaced, loading and unloading my other large snake cage and a bunch of stuff out of Tristan’s garage, I’m all tired out. While making my evening rounds with the camera, I noticed that the white lilies, Rosencrantz and a hummingbird where tired out as well.
Tristan gave me this bromeliad for Father’s Day. It sits in front of my computer adding extra color to the kitchenscape.
Note: Leo is mistaken. It was a leaf hopper katydid exploring my computer. Insect identification has never been one of Leo’s (or my) strengths.
All five lilies on the one stem finally bloomed. Quite a nice array.
I call this black dragonfly a “Night Fury” because I had been trying to get a photo of it for over a week — it had not let me get close enough to it until I climbed into the bamboo patch just before sundown and waited for it to land close enough to focus on it. The other two dragonflies in this series were very cooperative, as usual, but the Night Fury refused to land anywhere in the open outside the bamboo patch.
The forecast for Corrales was for a high of 94º F on Sunday. Our thermometer showed a wind chill of 101.3º F at 3:00 pm. On Saturday the thermometer was reading 105º F, but since I had it mounted on a post close to the pump house, I suspected it might be picking up reflected heat; so I moved the thermometer to a post in the middle of nowhere on the property, and mounted at 6 feet of the ground, so the 101.3º F should be pretty accurate. The other two photos are cobweb covered stuff in the shed.
Off Center & Not Even 