Buckeye Butterfly

We call this a "Buckeye Butterfly" because the round spots on the wings look a lot like the native Ohio plant that has beautiful seeds called: "Buckeyes"

Hobos

I subscribed to National Geographic Magazine for years and on the front cover of one issue was a story about a woman in Tennessee who carved characters out of wood that represented her kin and fellowman living in her area.

I was fascinated by the story and some of the pictures about the wood carver. I remember picking up a piece of wood and used it to carve one of the characters shown here. They are also painted using ink thinned with water.

I have had them setting around for many years and can still see them standing on a shelf in my closet here in my office.

I bought two new sets of wood carving tools and never really used them--I preferred a regular pocket knife to do the carvings with and I still carry that around with me in my pants pocket.

Zinnia

Zinnia came up this year from seed that sprouted in the area where old flowers from previous years had been planted.

I really wish I could get some of my old Cleome to come up and bloom so I could get some new seed.

The seeds I save are often forgotten about until a few years later and then I end up dumping all of them in the same general area.

Honeybees

We used to have thousands of honeybees around here but they seemed to vanish. This is one of them before they disappeared.

I didn't plant any new flowers this summer and wonder if I should have? I do have "Lavender" that all bees love and I did see lots of small, black, bumblebees on that this summer and yesterday I saw a honeybee on it, so the honeybees are still in the area and I am thankful for that.

There were two large hives of honeybees in the large maple tree behind out house and both hives left and landed on the spruce tree

Daddy Long Legs

Spider on chrysanthemum in the garden of special delights. The gardener is not on duty and Daddy Long Legs came out to play. It is getting colder here where I live so I turned the office furnace on and flipped the switch for the main furnace to come on and it did. My fingers were almost too cold for me to type. The Gardener will be going to the plantation in Florida this winter. If I had my "druthers" I'd druther be somewhere south of Brookville, Ohio--almost anywhere if it is warmer.

Canon Rebel Cameras

I am happy with the 5 thousand photos of Coopers Hawks that I photographed since we have lived here. All of them were taken with a Canon Rebel camera and some with a longer lens that I no longer have. I used to think it was important to get up as close to the hawk as I could using the best lens I had but I learned that it is not always the closeup that makes the best picture but the person who took the picture and when the shutter clicked makes the best picture. And, of course, the people who make the Canon cameras want to keep you buying their cameras so they advertise the lenses and accessories that goes with the camera to keep you hooked. After a while you have so much Canon stuff that you can't afford to start over with a Nikon camera and their standard, out-of-the-box lens. I like Nikon. I even owned one of their first 35mm cameras and took a lot of color film using it while I was stationed in Japan but I sold it when I got back to the states and now I just have Canon . I do wish Canon would put a red plastic strip someone on their new models so I could think I got the best camera with a red stripe on it. Now, these many years later, it doesn't matter which camera I use because I no longer mess ith the results trying to make them look different or better than the originals.

Driving Miss Audrey

It is truly hard to believe that this is Audrey. She wasn't very old but was living with her mom at our house in Brookville, Ohio. Patty used to take her to school every morning and go pick her up every evening and did that for many years. All of a sudden Miss Audrey grew up and is now able to drive her mother to our house and back home. Now, however, they have moved south to the Centerville area and driving down there will be different from driving around the big city of Brookville, Ohio.