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Arachnophobes beware! I finally timed it right and captured the largest of the many orb weavers in our backyard this morning building its new web. This timelapse at a frame a second, captures about an hour’s worth of webspinning.

It’s roughly 80 seconds this phoebe (I think) spent at our bird bath, but through the magic of Quicktime I’ve put the way brief timelapse on an endless loop. Now all it needs is the appropriate musical accompaniment… “Rockin’ Robin” perhaps?

Here’s two hours in the afternoon of one of my Great Sunflower Project sunflowers, timelapsed down to eight minutes. In addition to all the bees that visit it as it bops around in the breeze, at one point (about 1:35 in) this bloom gets the attention of a spotless ladybug, and later (about 6:52 in) the camera picks up the blurred-out shape of a squirrel cruising across the top of the fence in the background. Blink and you’ll miss ‘em.

Answer: A flash-flood.

(You’ll wanna click it for the bigger picture)

Directions: After enjoying turkey and all the fixin’s, and then lighting a campfire, mount a camera on a tripod at Eureka Dunes Thanksgiving Day evening with a waxing gibbous moon behind you. Next point the camera out into the pitch darkness in the general ballpark direction of north over the Last Chance Mountains. Manually focus the lens to just short of infinity and cross your fingers that’s correct. Then open the shutter for the 35 minutes you spend with your Baybee! and your dawg at the roaring flames hypnotized by the dancing licks while soaking in the still and serene solitude of it all as little brown bats dart through the air around you. As the flames start to die down and the cold temps encroach, return to the camera, close the shutter and the above stars-in-the-daylight illusion is what you get. Savor and enjoy.

Loads of other pix shot at much faster shutter speeds are here in this set on Flickr.

So in terms of resolvolutions for the new year, in regards to my bicyclingz I’ve decided not to peg a 2009 finish line to any specific number. Instead, my goal for the new year is simply to Bike Every Day — whether it’s one mile or 100 — and see how far it takes me across the year.

Toward that end, here’s the begining: my first 10 miles on the first day of the year, which of course features my first encounter with a sightless driver in Elysian Valley (blink and you’ll miss it at around 1:42 in) who makes a full stop at her cross street stop sign but then basically bursts across the intersection right in front of me. Glad one of us was paying attention:

PS. There’s nothing quite like standing at the top of a year-long accomplishment on December 31 and less than a day later starting the long climb up from the bottom of the next one to put it all in perspective. I know it all adds up, but erasing 6,600 miles and replacing it with 10 in my little bike mileage tally box on the right was a lot tougher than I thought it would be.