When It's Just Too Dadgum Hot and Humid for a Long Walk

go to J's yard, where something exciting is bound to happen.

Like this.

Does This Happen to Everyone? (Part 2)

This morning, stalled in traffic and bored (tree cutters ahead), I opened the windows, turned off the car, and snapped this picture (thinking I could get mileage with a colleague who was more than an hour late to tutoring because of a huge traffic jam in her very large city). 

As soon as I snapped the picture, it happened.

A huge dragonfly buzzed me at my window. I am not kidding. A Green Darner. It zoomed across the highway, over my car, hovered, zoomed back, and so on, for at least five passes. I'm sure the people behind me thought I was crazy. (I might have had the person doing the neck-craning been someone else.) But crane my neck I did and look and look and look.

This wasn't the first unexpected ode encounter of the week. Three days ago, within about half an hour of walking in my front door, I walked out again and, when I turned around to lock it, saw a beautiful, fresh, female Calico Pennant caught in a spider web. She had not been there thirty minutes earlier, but now she was -- and still alive. Of course, I removed her and pulled spider string from her so she could fly. And she did.

Then, this afternoon, I stood at the fish pond in Abbo's Alley, looking for Great Blue Skimmers. I placed myself behind a tree at the edge of the pond, so I wouldn't startle a dragonfly. I decided to step to the right a bit, and as soon as I started to move, caught sight of a Great Blue directly in front of me, perched on the tree. I snappedsnappedsnapped before he flitted away. (Tree on the left of the frame. I was so close that I couldn't even focus on the whole insect.)

More and more, I have come to think of myself as the odonate whisperer.

Hear me roar! (They won't care since they can't hear!)

For "Does This Happen to Everyone (Part 1)," click here.

Only for You

Great Blue Skimmer --

your blue/green eyes

your white frons
your young dark red and yellow abdomen

your mature powder blue abdomen

your wide wide wings

your powerful flight --

today I only have eyes for you.

A Long Conversation

with a fellow who lives across from Day Lake wandered from talk of Mr. Cheston, Little Mountain, cattle, horses, celebrating seniors and their parents leaving garbage at Day Lake, the crew team, his grandchildren, our mutual love of the land, dragonflies and damselflies . . . and then this happened: the Great Blue Skimmer I had seen flying behind and above the gentleman's head floated down right between us and we both took long looks.

Do they come from something like caterpillars? he asked.

More like cicadas, I said.

Oh, he said, those are the shells I see right around the water.

Yup, I said.

Ain't they pretty?

I couldn't agree more.

Thinking about Blogging, Blogs, and the Internet

Thursday, I will give a blogging workshop for university students.  I have worked on my PowerPoint presentation to accompany the online workshop for a couple of weeks, first off and on and then in a concentrated manner on the weekend.  My head is filled with information, and my eyes are dizzy with the array of blogs and bloggers.

In the middle of my research, a friend and I talked about photography and dragonflies and the Web.  He commented that the Internet allowed others to see private pursuits and obsessions in a way never allowed before.  He's right.  Before the popular version of the Internet introduced in the 1990s, only serious birders would meet other birders, for example.  Now anyone can take a peek, and sometime the peek is fascinating.

Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Clouds 365 Project Blog posted by photograph Kelly DeLay
2. I Love Charts curated by Jason and Cody (this blog has become a book)
3. NeverSeconds published by a British schoolgirl
4. Paper and Salt combines author portraits and anecdotes with recipes
5. A Lady in London provides delightful armchair traveling
6. The Everywhereist written by a young traveler who recently had brain surgery

It's a comfort, oddly, to know that thousands of strangers out there are as driven as I by some quirky topic that they write to unknown audiences every day.  Perhaps we aren't so strange, and perhaps we aren't strangers.

Thanks to the Internet.

And now I add my photo of a Great Blue Skimmer to the 133 others published online in the last week, and with it and this photo I join the strange conversation!