two

I was lucky enough to see this garden spider (we call them big ladies.) outside our front window. I've never seen one with her egg sac before and this was a special treat. This was the closest I could get without {completely} upsetting her. As it was, she guarded her eggs the entire time I was around and only relaxed her vigilance once I took the step stool and my camera away. I saw her looking more relaxed when I resumed watching her from inside the house. We've had quite a bit of cold weather recently and I haven't seen her through the window since the cold weather. It seems she got her egg sac finished just in time. I look forward to seeing her babies hatch and pour out of their egg sac this spring.

ant season

We have been a little preoccupied with ants over here lately, it being ant season and all. This time of year always brings a certain number of ants inside the house and a huge number outside the house. I have plugged up most of the places that I can find where the ants come into the house and am fine letting the one or two who I find wandering around to continue to wander. They come and go and eventually ant season mellows out and there are no more ants in the house. This year there even seems to be extra spiders in some key places helping to keep the ant population in the house to a minimum. Eva and I really enjoy keeping tabs on the spider families as well as watching the flow of ants- particularly queen ants- making their way, both inside and outside.

The best ant watching by far, though, has to be out on the patio. Most of the year you can find at least one or two ants walking back and forth across the patio (to where or for what, we don't quite know) along the ant path. Eva and I are well trained in stepping over the ant trail, particularly at this time of year. We love watching the different ant styles- the small ants, the medium ants, the large ants... How cranky they seem to be with one another. How the larger ants look slightly perplexed. How the small ants swarm more around their ant hill openings. How the ants come out of their holes sometimes alone, sometimes in groups. How when they are in groups they snip at one another and seem confused by so many other ants being around. How they are all going in the same direction, along the same path, with such a purpose but still seem slightly absent minded about the whole thing. Unstoppable. Not quite comprehensible to human minds.

Right now the queens are coming out of the medium and large ant colonies in large numbers and yesterday Eva and I had fun helping the ones who were trapped by the patio screen find their way out- helping them with their life purpose and all that {what queen ant doesn't dream of flying off to start her very own ant colony after all?}. There were so many queens out yesterday they were practically swarming in the patio and you can imagine my surprise today when I went out on to the patio and saw even more queens with so many helper ants all around them, ostensibly helping them find their way? Making sure the coast was clear? Making sure the queens don't get cold feet and go back into the colony? Just milling around chatting with one another about the big day? Eva thought some of them were trying to decide if they might want to go off with the new queens to help set up the new colonies? Who can really say except the ants. Maybe some of those ant scientists out there fearlessly studying the social lives of ants? Don't tell me they aren't out there. I haven't tried googling yet. The last time I googled ants I got discouraged because the majority of the information I found was on how to um exterminate them. So not quite the information I was looking for. Ahem.



Ant watching 101. The ant path with strings of ants marching along on their mission. The ants on this path are all medium ants. Usually there will be a large ant here and there but they are definitely in the minority. I think the large ants are my favorite type of ant. Unless you count the very wee babiest ants of the small ants who are the smallest of the small and who elicit a squeal of delight from Eva.



Large queen ant making her way to her destiny. Swarm of medium and large queen ants (and helpers) coming out of one of the colony doors on the patio.

on lists

I have this desire lately to just post lists- lists of bugs seen, lists of fruit picked, lists of errands run, lists of games played by my kids, lists of music heard, books read, outings outed, fun had, being here and what that entails- as though the lists would speak for themselves and would need no explanation for understanding.

What would a list of bugs-seen really give you though? An idea of bugs in our backyard, the idea that we look at bugs, how we spend time down at bug level checking them out. How most days are filled at some point with some bug's life purpose and wondering about that. How Eva says "boo" to spiders in their webs and how the other day in traffic she said "boo" to the traffic to make it go away. (She said, if I can scare a spider in her web, I can certainly scare the traffic.) How it is spider season and the big ladies are out in full form right now and how I unfortunately have no camera {again}. Lost and bereft without my camera I am reduced to posting links to big ladies to give you an idea of their qualities- both their bigness and their ladyness. And here she is, our most famous big lady, the Cross Spider. We took flashlights out last night to check out some of the bigger spiders and the Cross Spiders are quite grand. There is one on the patio near the drying clothes and another one-even larger!- out front near the road with a third somewhat smaller but still impressive one behind her. Ah, to be outside on a September night with a flashlight and lots of spiders for viewing...

I look forward to it all year. That and the tomatoes. There isn't a much better time of year than this one right now.

driving down the road samuel asked me why mario has an M on his hat commencing a conversation about {ha!} monogramming and whether or not i know of anyone who monograms their clothing? do i? i could not for the life of me remember and all that came to mind were land's end adds and monogramming towels and beach bags and i giggled and then i remembered laverne and shirley! and the L on laverne's sweaters and drove down the road laughing laughing laughing about those sweaters and that show. the kids joined me when i described lenny and squiggy- hello!- opening up the door whenever something the slightest bit unsavory was mentioned- hello! and then what would they do? samuel asked and i went on to explain the basic gist of the show and sang just what makes that little ole' ant...much to the delight of eva who laughed and laughed and forgot she was carsick all at the same time. i have to say i did love happy days but laverne and shirley has a special place in my heart. we're gonna do it our way, yes our way, make all our dreams come true, me and you.



jumping spider who jumped at me when my photographing became too much- i still couldn't get quite close enough. i would like a spider lens.

bug quest

Eva and I have been out and about with the insects and spiders quite a bit lately. We took these together- earwig, honey bee, slug taking in some water...



Growing Cross Spider...she is actually quite a bit smaller than she will be in the fall but so much bigger than the babies we saw just the other day. I think this is one of the spiders whose webs I kept disturbing to open the shed door where the lawn mower is stored. She was finally frustrated enough to move her web just around the corner. I wish I could say the same for Momma Yellow Jacket who continues to build her nest, albeit slowly, in the corner of the shed. She no longer looks up whenever I enter, so used to my presence is she and confident, apparently, that I mean her no harm. Hopefully she will tell her babies as much. Our missions in this life are not so very different after all.

on cats and pee and bugs and such

So the other day I made the enchanting discovery that our cat Agnes had not only peed on a few of the stuffed animals, she had actually crawled into the bins and peed on all of the stuffed animals. That was the day that I spent a good portion of my time washing and drying stuffed animals. The day that the sun came out and it began to heat up outside. A perfect day to lay all of the freshly laundered animals outside to dry.

This turned out to be not such a bad way to spend a day (what is, after all, a bad way to spend a day, when you think about it...) and Eva and I hung out quite a bit outside, mostly checking out the different ants living around our patio area. We are all well versed in the two families, the big ants and the little ants, where they live, how they spend their time, where they go on their forays- although truth be told we have- each of us- (Eva, Samuel, and I) followed the big ants on their treks across the patio to the area by the garden hose and none of us can figure out where they are going. They go, one after the other, one at a time, maybe one or two in a long line. They return. We follow and watch. They never carry anything to or from. My guess at this point is they are going for water? It seems like a very long trek for water but who am I to judge. Their colony is large and thriving and aside from the mini skirmishes they seem to have for no apparent {to human eyes} reason with the little ants, they are very prosperous.

After the third or fourth load of stuffed animals, I laid out a second sheet and Eva and I put more animals out to dry. Around the time that I was bringing out another load Eva started noticing so many baby spiders. One here. Another one. And then strangely all over the baby giraffe. Some on the baby penguin. How odd. Another one? Where are they coming from. I started looking around. Were they on the sheet? Were they in the house? Look Momma, they are coming from over here. And sure enough they were. We found the baby spider nest/egg that had popped open very close to where the animals were drying. So many baby spiders being coaxed out to the sunshine and wind. A perfect day to crawl out from the egg and start a new life...on a stuffed giraffe's head.

Amazingly, after I went inside again, Eva began "evacuating" all of the animals from the sheet closest to the spiders until there was just the baby giraffe. When I came back outside I picked up the spiders and their tiniest webs from the giraffe's head and the wind and I relocated them to other homes, away from the animals. Away from the possibility of being closed up inside a plastic bin in my garage...

This part was actually amazing to watch. Baby spiders everywhere, jumping on the forget-me-nots, cascading down onto the plastic kitchen and as I gently shook the spiders out of the sheet, Eva and I watched as so many of them ballooned out into the wind. Do you remember the scene in Charlotte's Web where the baby spiders became ballooners? These baby spiders definitely became ballooners. And so many of them. We are finding them all over our yard now, so many spaces just right for a baby spider web. These spiders will grow up to be garden spiders, spinning large orb webs across doorways and between tomato plants in the fall. For now I am enjoying their tiniest of orb webs in the rose bushes and among the chamomile as they gobble up an amazing number of aphids. Aphids! Who knew? They did apparently. Spiders always know right where to go.



So many stuffed animals drying in the sunshine...so many aphids loving the roses. If I were a spider that is definitely where I would build my web.



Can you see the baby spiders on baby giraffe's ear?

We keep going places and I don't have my camera. We went to the Farmers Market yesterday and it is such a nice mix of tomatoes and squashes and apples. I bought apples and two chickens, one of which we ate yesterday (and a little more today). The kids had biscuits with huckleberry jam and cupcakes with very sweet frosting and I also bought these amazing dark chocolate covered hazelnuts because it is that time again, the time for hazelnuts.

Before the market, we took two giant bags of miscellaneous plastic and another big bag of plastic bags/plastic film to the plastic roundup. Samuel found a plastic case that he just had to have in the reuse section and now that is also in the garage. I am going to give it a little more time before I move it over into the recycling section {again- but this time for our family}. Our recycling company takes a larger variety of plastics now and I have my plastic roundup recycling down to just the miscellaneous, unlabeled plastics, which is nice and totally doable three or four times a year.

Today we stayed home and now that it is almost time for bed, I am wishing I had made more of an effort to get Eva out to the park or at least a walk because she is currently racing herself across the carpet on her knees alternately with swimming across the kitchen floor. She currently seems to have quite a bit more energy than I do. Hmmm...

Friday we went with a group of other home schoolers to the Columbia Slough classroom and learned about watersheds. Portland is one of two cities in the country that gets its water from a natural watershed source (hoping I got that fact straight). We also took a walk around Whitaker Pond, where the classroom is located, and saw signs of beavers! and frogs! and a whole berry-tree full of cedar waxwings! I am smitten with cedar waxwings after hearing their call for the first time while camping last summer. Lots of Red Alders and Black Cottonwoods.

After that we got Hotlips pizza and spent several hours at the park with our friends Nicole and Esme and Eva and Esme played and played and played. Earlier this week we spent time at another park with our friends Kate and Jack and Samuel and Jack played and played and played. Nice for me because I get to talk and talk and talk. Nice to be outside for a while during these fall days. We actually had hail on Thursday, along with quite a bit of rain. The weather was quite cold for Portland for the next two nights and it nearly froze. Today I found a garden spider inside the house, near the front door, looking for a reprieve from the cold I guess. I can't help but wonder if her luck will be as good in here as outside but I suppose she will go back outside if it isn't.

I did some cool weather planting today and was excited to see that my patron saint Kale left some ferrel kale plants outside of the raised beds! I replanted some of them next to the little plants I bought at the coop. There should be kale this winter for sure!

While clearing out the space for the kale, taking out some dried up sweet peas and queen anne's lace (carrot flowers), I found the largest big lady (genus Araneus, she's a cross spider!) that I have seen yet this season. I have to say that if I had known I would be displacing her, I would have cleared out another area in the garden. She has such a short time here and I just love her luminescent webs in the sunshine and moonlight. I am hopeful she will find another space...

buggy

Just be(e)

I found the closeup on my camera finally! I mean the real closeup that lets you take picture of bees and spiders and such. I wish I had found it earlier in the day because I saw a spider yesterday that I have never seen before. She was a huge black spider about the size of the Orb Weavers in October (Banded Garden Spiders, etc) but she was not an orb weaver. She was more along the lines of a tarantula, but of course, not nearly as large. Still, she was large enough that when I typed in "giant black spider in Pacific Northwest" I found her and there was no mistake about it. She turned out to be a Female Mouse Spider and she was about 1/2" in her body with her legs making he seem much larger. I have to say that the warnings about her (or really the male's) potential bite actually gave me pause. They are not aggressive spiders and will not chase you but the male has a nasty bite if provoked and I assumed the female could be provoked as well. I could just imagine our cat Magoo going out and chasing her around, that is how big she was.

I actually saw her stuck in another spider's web and I went and got a large stick (because even I did not want her crawling on me) and freed her from the web before the other spider could wrap her up. Then I used my knitting scissors! to cut the very strong web that was on one of her legs to free her so she could run away. Then I went in to look her up and then I was little um nervous about her being out on the porch. But I have lived near black widows (in San Rafael) and brown recluses (in Kansas City) and of course the aggressive house spider in both San Rafael and here (I just saw one in our bath tub recently and one out on the patio) and I think the thing that made me pause about this spider in particular was that she was so BIG and BLACK and really just so substantial walking around out there. I left her alone and when we came back from the upick she was gone- off to burrow or hunt or lay eggs, whatever a female Mouse Spider does on a fine autumn day.

It's Christmas Eve

It is indeed Christmas Eve and as Samuel would say, or has been saying all day long, "Does there have to be a day before Christmas? Why? Why? Why?" Needless to say, we have not had the most um shall we say joyous Day before Christmas, but it has been intense. We feel our intensity very intensely around here and today was no exception.

Here is some fun!



Jack asleep on some books. Need I say more?



Oh and I am so excited! One of my giant spider ladies that I kept track of during the summer and fall is still living! She found a little warm spot with a leaf near our front door and allowed me to take this photo, albeit hesitatingly. She is suspicious of me if I stay too long.



And here is my Pulla! It is a lot of fun.



Samuel and Eva with the big plate of cookies; Santa's cookies and eggnog (see the Santa cookie Samuel made!) Eva is sampling a big piece of Pulla in the first photo.

We made chocolate chip, oatmeal scotchies, sugar cookies with icing and brownies. Plus our neighbor brought us this big plate of assorted Christmas cookies she made. So that is a lot of cookies.



And this is what Charlie does when you come over near his cage. He really likes snacks and will eat most anything you suggest. He is an avid eater, to say the least.




And here are all of the babies all fancy for Christmas.

busy creating

Eva helping to make pita bread; Eva and her lego creation; we also made an apple lady bug after being inspired by an issue of Your Big Backyard. That same day we painted rocks and transformed them into beetles. That was a lot of fun. They are now sitting in between the nature table and the art table, being a little bit of both as painted beetle rocks.



A study in blue and red knights and monsters. Samuel has been painting quite a few of these red and blue knights fighting various monsters and mythical creatures. This week he painted his largest painting yet (his words). There he is before painting and there the painting is after. I hung it in the hallway where there is plenty of room to see it clearly in all of its knight and fire-breathing monsterness.



And of course the great spider lady in our front yard is just grand now. What a creation her web is, eh?

I made some pita bread today which I have not made for many years. The last time I made it we had just one cat! (not three cats, a dog, a hamster and two kids) and we were living in Brooklyn. It turned out pretty well this time. Some of them did not puff up but a couple did and that is always a thrill to see! Eva enjoyed helping to roll out the dough before we put them in the oven. Hers puffed up the most I think because she rolled hers out so thoroughly. They were very thin. I think some of her train cars helped to roll them out, something I will try and remember for next time! I did have to make sure none of the plastic horses were left in the dough before putting them in the oven.

And some great tea-
nettles
chamomile
lemon balm
thyme
Infuse for a couple of hours or longer. It is a great immune boost and really flavorful. The thyme really complements the chamomile. I highly recommend it!

Well, I brought in some laundry that had finally dried out on our patio this evening (it can take a couple days when it is really raining a lot here). I began folding the shirts and then out popped a pretty big spider. She was over an inch with her legs and she held onto my pants and would not budge when we tried to put her in a cup (maybe she had been in a cup before?) and finally I walked with her still on my pants outside and coaxed her off near some leaves and she ran away. When I went back inside and finished folding the laundry, I found a large pillow shaped egg sac! on my sweatpants that had been outside drying. Ack. I hate this kind of thing. Obviously, she knew where her egg sac was and didn't want to leave it. Silly human, always up to knowing better. So I went back outside! and looked around for her but it is dark and even with a flashlight it is pretty hard to find a spider on a patio with a bunch of fallen leaves about, even if she was large and bulbous and brown.

Ugh. So I put the egg sac back outside and am wishing hard that it is a type of spider (because I couldn't figure out which kind she was) that doesn't guard its young or stick around with them after they have hatched AND that she might still be able to lay another egg sac.

I hate the idea of getting in the way of someone's creation like that. I know it was an accident and my intentions were so obviously not to separate her from her egg sac- I have never intentionally done any harm to a spider. Ever. Still, I don't feel great about it and feel like my queasiness of having her sitting on my leg hampered my own um connection. So that is that. I really need to check the laundry a little more closely!

“The means to gain happiness is to throw out from oneself like a spider in all directions an adhesive web of love, and to catch in it all that comes”
- Tolstoy

Eva took some photos of some of the largest spiders living in our front yard. We counted five giant spiders last night- there are others but these five all have bodies of about a 1/2 inch and their bodies plus legs are about 1 1/2 inches, maybe a little larger. They are big. I think four of them are banded garden spiders. One of them I thought was a large yellow garden spider but after looking at photos I don't think so any more. I lost the link of the spider I thought it was. Oh well, suffice it to say she is one large spider!





Two of the spiders were frightened by the flash. They ran off of their web to their hiding spot. The other three stood their ground, with one of them even displaying at the camera, putting her forelegs out to show us she was fierce and prepared to protect her web and/or eat us. It was tricky for Eva to get so close without running into the webs. I thought they turned out pretty good.

spiders

Well, I have already posted about spiders once recently. But I do love them so. Spider season is a fun time and it is in full swing now with the spiders getting bigger and bigger. I counted at least 7 different spiders and 5 different species making webs in just one window of my home. I love spiders and we co-habitate well together. I have been running into more and more webs that are suspended further and further out from tree branches and rose bushes and plants and in the car window and suspended from the roof and seemingly in mid-air. The other day I walked into three giant spider webs complete with spiders. They don't want to be on my head any more than I want them there and it is a mad scramble for both of us. And these are big spiders too, the larger banded garden spiders and they are getting bigger by the day. Then, if that weren't enough for one day, I put on my jeans that I had drying out on the clothesline and there was a spider, complete with web, inside one of the legs. I guess this is why I haven't found very many ear wigs lately.

The kids and I have also been going again out at night with a flashlight to check out the spiders. This is a great time to see them. They are out in all their glory, often catching several insects. We keep track of the biggest spiders and check on them periodically. There are two right now in the front that are vying for largest-spider-in-the-yard-status, otherwise known as the big-ladies. I like to find their hiding places as well. Usually you can trace one of the web lines to a leaf or flower or some small hiding place and if the spider is not in the center of her web, she can be found hiding behind the leaf, etc.

For those who haven't seen the link about the giant spider web in Texas... What fun to think of those spiders weaving those webs together.

And here is an interesting biology blog...

spider season

One of my favorite things about this time of year is the spiders. You can see their webs in the grass, all shimmery with dew in the morning or in the rain. There are just dozens and dozens of them all across our lawn. If you get down to their level you can look down into their web tunnels and see them waiting inside the tunnels, ready to jump out and pounce. We have several spiders on the patio guarding egg sacs and dozens in the compost bin. Lots of baby spiders. We have little crab spiders on the flowers. Two months ago we had an egg sac hatch near the patio and we watched the babies for days crawl around and jump into the wind and find suitable places to build the tiniest webs. These babies were banded garden spiders, one of my favorite spiders. They are the giants you see outside in large orb webs, particularly at night, at the end of summer. They can be an inch across with very long legs and are striking when you take a flashlight out at night and shine it on them. Right now they are still young and smallish (about a 1/4 inch) but over the next month or so they will grow quite large.