[sic]

Thirteen days after planting the sunflower seeds provided me as part of my participation in the Great Sunflower Project, I finally watered me some seedlings instead of bare soil! Woo-hoo!

While carrying my bike around a closed gate on Elysian Park Road during the beginning part of another awesome edition of last night’s RIDE-Arc ride, in the darkness I somehow managed to spy something scurrying along the ground out from under my feet and my first thought was I’d disrupted some poor lizard’s evening.

Never In my wildest did I think I’d come across what was before me, but when it came to a full, very unlizard-like stop, a few feet downslope from me, I trained my bike’s headlights on it and could not contain my enthusiasm.

(click to triplify)

“Scorpion!” I yelled, and that drew the interested attentions of a few other fellow cyclists nearby who “whoa’d” and “no way’d” along with me. “How big is it?” someone asked. “Because it’s the little ones you have to watch out for!”

Good to know because this one certainly wasn’t b-i-g big, about three inches from pincer tips to surprisingly laidback stinger. Of course rather than move away I proceeeded to unholster the cam while simultaneously holding the bike tilted so as to keep its light source pointed on the obliging creature while kneeling to get closer.

“Good eyes,” said another cyclist to me who stepped up and brought his cam to bear on it to snap some frames alongside me.

Other snaps from the ride, which included crashing a film set in Griffith Park and being escorted out by every park ranger on duty that evening, are here.

I’m regularly harping what one misses while behind the wheel of an automobile, but the same thing can happen from a bike saddle, too. I pass this building at the bottom of the hill on my street every day on my way to work and most of the time on my way home, and assuming these massive sunflowers didn’t just sprout to this height overnight I found them in all their tall awesome for the first time today (click image for triplification).

I lamented a couple weeks ago about the tiny doorframe spider whose days I figured were numbered after discovering the birth and subsequent disbursement of her multitudinous babies.

Not quite: Turns out she’s got another eggsac working. You go girl:

Tis the season… for goatheads. Grrrrrrrrrreat.

I don’t know where I picked this fine fellow up but I saw it stuck in my front tire while I was still a couple miles away from work this morning. At least it had the decency to stay embedded in the sidetread and keep enough air in the tube to get me to the office without having to stop and patch it.

That’s what lunch hours are for.

There are few things I truly hate, but invasive plants — such as pampas and fountain grasses, mustard weed, fennel, and the creeper known simply and succinctly as puncture vine that produces these tire flattening beasties — never fail to piss me off. Puncture vine is especially and vehemently detested due to the fact that its spiked seeds are the most common cause for my flat tires during the summer months.

Pretty productive morning.

1. Got a package sent off to the winning eBay bidder in Virginia — his prize a pair of Justin camel/elkskin boots I’ve had for 20 years and worn maybe four times during that period.
2. Got a haircut, while Susan got our grocery shopping done.
3. Went to see a matinee of “Indiana Jones” and it was okay in a shoulder-shruggy way. Having Indy pronounce “nuclear” as “noo-kyoo-lur” and have Shia TheBeef’s first appearance onscreen be in a total ripoff of Marlon Brando’s character in “The Wild One” did nothing to endear the film to me, but the action sequences rocked.

And when we got home I rescued a grasshopper that I suspect Pepper of bringing inside. The thing wound up in the space between the stove and counter and I somehow managed to shepherd it into a paper bag that I then used to carry outside for its release on the fence where it proved to be in no hurry to get anywhere in particular so I grabbed the cam and got some up-close shots of it, like this one that’s clickably biggifiable, of course:

So she’s all by herself now, the tiny momma spider who tended her egg sac for weeks in the notch above our front door until her multitude of offspring emerged from it this past weekend. Alone again, naturally. It’s kind of sad because now that she’s done her duty she might herself be done. I don’t know why that chokes me up, a bit. But it does.

The thumbnail on the left was snapped this morning with not a baby in her immediate vicinity. The thumbnail on the right shows the nearest one who’s begun its journey through life by first moving a few feet away to the the other side of the door frame. The pencil eraser included in that image is not there to rub out the spiderling, but to give a better idea of how truly tiny these little eight-leggers are — especially when considering the previous and scale-less macro pix I snapped of them (here and here).

I mark this into evidence as Exhibit No. 4265 why one should always have a camera handy.

Don’t know when this fella landed on me or how long he hitched a ride on my pants leg but I noticed him (and snapped this macro) while stopped at Crescent Heights and Sixth and he didn’t disembark until I’d turned off Crescent Heights at Guthrie to cross La Cienega.

Yeah this is the second time I’ve posted about this spider and her recently hatched brood, but sometimes the most wonderous and amazing things bear repeating (click to triplify):

Making up for a lack of scale, momma spider’s no bigger than a pencil eraser and her surrounding babies are literally a bunch of eight-legged punctuation marks.

Since I first saw her more than a month ago on the molding above the front door, I’ve been keeping an eye on the tiny spider and  her pellet-sized egg sac. This morning I was treated to a double bonus: the babies are emerging and momma snared a meal (click to triplify):