In a spider galaxy not far away, a web teams with tiny arachnids scurrying hither and thither in the myriad twists and jumbles of threads, as the sun sets on their first day of life in their tangled universe.

A pink and purple iris, faded by the sun, wrapped its petals up like it was preparing for a cold night, and resembled a distant nebula. Aphids are feeding on a rosebud, swaying in the wind, against the afternoon sun, making the best of life before the ladybugs find them.

I had a cute inch worm get on my finger this afternoon. It was just about an inch long. Then a baby grasshopper was playing peek-a-boo on one of the roses. The little butterfly is a Pearl Crescent. I learned that from the butterfly guy, and puck was peeking over the top of the roof this afternoon. He wouldn’t look at the camera for some reason. The lead photo is an aging dandelion that looked interesting in the late afternoon sun.

My blood draw and port flush went well, other than how the port kept oozing blood after the nurse took the needle out. I had five bandaids on the port when I left. Today was one of those rare days that I had a bleeding heart. The blood stopped oozing when I read that Obama and Cameron were comparing themselves to Reagan and Thatcher. Give me a break! They are complete opposites.

Laurie usually eats green chile stew or carne adovada stew for breakfast on the way into the university in the morning. This morning she decided to try granola with milk on the way in. She managed not to spill it all over herself on the bumpy roads, and stop and go traffic, which was really good, but I think the granola influenced my bleeding heart.

I didn’t stick around for the results of my blood tests, and I assume they are normal since I didn’t get a call from the nurse telling me anything was out of whack. I have my PET scan on the 31st, the day after Memorial Day. The problem with that is I’m not supposed to eat carbs or exercise 24 hours before the PET scan. Hmmm! I guess I’ll have to laze around and eat steak all day on Memorial Day;• )

I actually did the Post Office run around today without getting PO’d. I purchased a business reply mail permit (BRM), “no postage necessary…” for the office. I had to go to the main post office once, and the downtown post office twice to complete the process; but the postal workers in the business department were nice, and got kind of excited to have something to do for the 45 minutes it took to complete all the paperwork.

On the way to the PO today, I came across a new Harley parked outside a bank. The sunset behind the leaf was irresistible, and another new iris bloomed.

Holy cow! They put a hula cow outside the Corrales Bosque Gallery. I don’t know who made it, but it’s a great sculpture.

The critters were out this afternoon, but between the clouds blocking the sun and a lot of critters hanging out on the east side of the house in the late afternoon shadow, only a bee came out the way I wanted it to.

I also got a white iris. White, slightly translucent flowers are difficult to get detail on and still hold the white. The iris came out pretty well tonight.

I have to go in for blood work in preparation for my PET scan on the 31st. I’m not sure if I’ll get any results tomorrow or not. It’s been over three months since my last blood work, so I’m interested to see the results if they give them to me tomorrow. They may just draw blood, flush my port and let me go, since there really won’t be any reason that I need to wait for results other than curiosity.

The cutest little spider hopped up on my finger while I was holding the leaf it was on trying to stabilize it in the wind. Once it got on my finger it was easier to photograph. Lane commented that the spiders are good models for me. I told him it’s because I tell them how cute and beautiful they are. Even spiders react well to complements!

I notice we have some different bees working the salvia. They looked like honey bees at first, but after a closer look, I could see that they are darker and their eyes are shaped differently from what I would call a standard honey bee. These bees were feeding on the plants, but didn’t seem to be collecting pollen.

There was a tiny little hopper hanging out on Pink Cascade this morning that turned out to be a great model.  It posed in several different position and looked very cute.  Laurie was trying to decide if it was beneficial or not. If not, a predator will have to take care of it — since it was such a great model, it earned it’s right to live as far as I’m concerned.

On the other hand, a lady bug on one of the roses was a terrible model. It would not hold still for a moment, and with the low light in the late afternoon, a 30th of a second was not fast enough to freeze the movement of a hyper lady bug. There weren’t any aphids on the rose it was racing around on. I’ll have to wait until the roses have aphids — I think lady bugs will hold still for a moment while they are chowing down on aphids.

Neither we nor the cats nor the bird were raptured. Oh well, I guess we have to live on in our ever-changing world. Coast to Coast AM had interesting guests and calls last night, and one common thread that developed was that people like to believe in doomsday soothsaying because they have trouble dealing with a rapidly changing world. They find comfort in the idea of being taken away rather than having to cope with reality and change.

We just finished listening to the last hour of last night’s Coast to Coast AM, and George Nori apparently disappeared in the middle pronouncing of the word “taken”.  Ian Punnet is on tonight, so maybe we’ll learn more about what happened to George. He could have been raptured or abducted by aliens.

The speaker at the Last Breakfast today was New Mexico’s Butterfly Guy, Steve Cary. He gave a good presentation and we bought his book Butterfly Landscapes of New Mexico. We have quite a few butterflies in our yard, but there are a surprisingly large number of butterflies that live at even higher elevations. The most interesting thing we learned is that the larvae and caterpillars eat a few specific plants, depending on the species, but the adults eat pretty much anything.

The wind was blowing most of the afternoon, so I didn’t see many butterflies, although the bird in the photo series tonight did catch a white butterfly on the wing. Besides Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I included a dandelion and a peony.

Judgement day comes tomorrow at 6:00 pm according to Harold Camping, an 89-year-old former engineer turned doomsday soothsayer. He has calculated tomorrow’s date and time from the book of Ezekiel. Interestingly enough, I saw another calculation done based on Revelations that puts judgement day tomorrow and the end of the world on October 21, 2011.

As a natural skeptic and chronic crank, I don’t believe the world will end tomorrow, unless some extremists decide to use the doomsday scenario to start nuking their enemies. I wouldn’t be surprised if extremists use the idea of Armageddon and the Arab Spring as an excuse to attack Israel.  Kind of like Jones Town and Heaven’s Gate, there are sure to be extremists who will try to make it happen no matter what. Unlike the suicide cults, the extremists will try to take as many innocent people as they can out, along with themselves.

I’m right and the world doesn’t end tomorrow, what should be done with Mr. Camping? It seems to me that soothsaying of this degree should have consequences if his prediction doesn’t come to pass.  If you are wondering why I’m not referring to Mr. Camping as a prophet, it’s because Biblical prophets did not foretell the future.  Fortune telling was sorcery and still is.  By the way, Moynihan told Nixon in 1970 that New York City and Washington, D.C. would be under water in 30 years because of global warming. Thirty years have passed, and both cities are high and dry. I had a book called the Doomsday Myth that countered all the doomsday predictions through the late 1980’s. So far the doomsday predictions have all proved to be myths, and all the soothsayers have gotten off scott free. There was a time when soothsayers were put to death if their predictions didn’t come true. Death is a little extreme, but fines, jail, public humiliation, if that exists anymore, might be fitting.

I go more with the idea of a “world without end” as sung in the ending line of one of the Methodist doxologies. Therefore, I included photos of dramatic skies I photographed this afternoon, another new iris, a clematis and a honeysuckle in tonights photo lineup. Yes. I am an optimistic chronic crank!

Stretch could be a comic. He’s always talking to me and doing funny things. He also likes to argue with me; for example, whenever I take a bath, he goes on and on explaining how silly it is for me to get in all the water, when all I need to do to bathe is lick myself like a cat. I try to explain to him that if humans were meant to bathe by licking ourselves, we would have been given long, scratchy, opposable tongues instead of opposable thumbs that allow us to use washcloths.

“Your thumbs and washcloths are all well and good.” Stretch counters, “But I can go out, roll in the dirt, lick myself clean, and I smell better than you when you are done with your bath!” Hmmm! I can’t argue against that. Cats can get themselves incredibly clean and don’t have body odor, even after rolling in nasty old dirt. When people go out and roll in the dirt and don’t bathe, they get pretty disgusting. Kitties are definitely “green” on water usage to cleanliness ratio.

Other than Stretch sticking out his tongue at me when I was photographing him through the window, I got a couple of America roses, Berries ‘n Cream, peonies and a new iris that bloomed this afternoon.

Bueno Foods celebrated their 60th year in business today on the 4th Street Mall in Downtown. They had a mariachi group playing and gave away Bueno bags with green chile, tortillas and coupons.

The news was there and someone scheduled a conga line flash mob with a couple dressed as red and green chiles leading it. I didn’t stick around for the flash mob, but got a photo of the chilies waiting to go into flash mob action. Actually, the ice cream vendor was more interesting than the chiles.

I’m irrigating tonight and was looking forward to being done before 10:00; however, the water was coming in pretty slowly, so I might be up tending to it a little later tonight.

The temperature has dropped considerably since I got home. It’s cloudy and windy, but doesn’t seem like it’s going to rain. We could sure use rain.

The kitties are happy tonight. Laurie’s been home for two days in a row, so they have been able to go out and in during that time.

Now that we are getting a few roses and can put roses in Stretch’s water bowl, he seems to be drinking more. That is great since he has kidney problems.

I found some old negatives and positives of photos I did several years ago the other night and decided to scan a couple of them. My old scanner is retarded. It deals with 35mm negatives and slides very well, but when it comes to medium format (6X6 cm) film it flips out! It came with a 6X6 cm carrier, so I assumed it could deal with medium format, which make up the vast majority of my slides and negatives. But no! When I tried to preview 6X6 film in normal or professional mode it told me it can’t find the it. So I tried it on full auto.

On the B&W negative of my bicycle racing memorabilia, it scanned the negative as a color photo, so I got a normal scan of the negative which is a negative image. Easy enough — I reversed it in Photoshop, cleaned it up and got it close to the original. The slide of a night scene downtown is a different story. The software said it detected a B&W negative, but simply scanned the carrier with the slide. I thought it made an interesting photo, but it certainly was not the result I was looking for.

Speaking of mutants, the third photo is an Iceberg rose on a bush that is supposed to be White Ice Berg, but gives pink blooms. It’s either a mutant, or they got a Pink Iceberg mixed in when they shipped our white, moonlight garden several years ago.

The black iris is still blooming and a B&W photo of it shows off the blackness pretty well. The last photo is of Pink Cascade that is blooming right outside our front door.