CaptainOrange

Okay, so you know about my New Zealand trip and my ongoing coffee obsession, but now that I am off G+ and Facebook, has my daily life stopped? Nope. Work The most straight forward part of my life is work. At least I feel that it has the fewest subheadings ;) I continue to work part-time at the library . Mostly, I am based out of the JS Wood Branch, but I find myself doing story times or special projects all around Saskatoon’s nine public branches. Much of my time is spent doing preparation and training for some of our newer programming staff and the rest is working with the public as a facilitator for paint nights, story times, robotics interactions, etc... I am currently working on a couple of special shows. One for the Remai Modern. I am doing a puppet show for them in September and the following week I am doing a workshop on shadow puppetry for teens. Another is for the Festival of Trees . The library will provide feature storytelling and puppetry at the end of the ...

I found this super industrious guy wandering about recently. He hauled this caterpillar up and down blades of grass in my lawn for half the morning. I must find some way to encourage this behaviour. Could solve all my pest problems.

I'm sick and tired. Literally. Sick with a cold, aches and nasty cough. Tired both because of said cold and because of my battle with garden pests. Chemicals would certainly make the job easier, but hand-to-hand seems so much more honourable. 16 on one leaf was the most I encountered. Smaller than these. At this time of year, caterpillars are our main foe. They particularly like our red current bush and Wendy's columbine. Last year they drove us to despair by consuming many baby bean plants and our beautifully maturing broccoli. I sent the girls in as a first line of defense. The insect hordes were as stars in the sky. Innumerable. Leora and Anwyn plucked as many as possible off the leaves, arms weary with exhaustion, and drowned them in a bucket of water. Hundreds from one bush. Then I sprayed the leaves to try and dislodge and discourage any too crafty to be caught. This morning I went out and counted another 150 or so plunging them to a watery death. Thank goodness I...

I have been playing around some more with the Pringles macro tube that I made at the beginning of May. As you noticed from the pictures in my last post , it was a bit unwieldily. Focus was nearly impossible and my tripod was not up to the task. I made some modifications. I may go into painful detail later. For now, I will say that I devised a system to dynamically set the magnification and added a limited degree of focal control. Then, I had some fun chasing bugs. The ones that can't move anymore are way easier to work with. Macro albums here  (misc incl. bugs) and here  (flowers and yard) I've been a little moody lately, which is why you haven't heard from me. I've also been reading a photographer's blog who gives great advice for using light (but particularly on camera flash). I put my mood together with the learning and got some cool shots using a combination of the sun and my new flash. It was all in the name of a greater personal project that I'm w...

Despite a lingering fear of larger specimens, I absolutely love spiders. When information about "vegetarian" spider started to circulate in October, I was thrilled. I've been busy working on the show and not had much time to look into it. Now that I have the week off during our performance run I've listened to a great radio interview and done a bunch more reading. For the overly interested: In this 10 minute .mp3 , Bob McDonald of Quirks and Quarks interviews Dr. Robert Curry (villanova.edu). Here is a .pdf copy of Curry's article published in Current Biology . Here is a supplemental paper and some videos of several spider specimens.

Brad and Jodi were up visiting for a couple of weeks. We managed a trip to the Narrows out at Waskesiu. Click below to see the photos with my oh-so-witty commentary. Waskesiu Later, Brad and I managed to melt glass with my new oxi-acetylene torch and to manufacture 1 Prince Rupert's Drop (Wikipedia.com) at a bargain price of about $100 *ouch* Prince Rupert's Drops

Many of you have seen these pictures already, but I realize that there are some of you out there, whom I love, but may not have sent the link to view them. Therefore I present to you our latest family trip. Hitchcock' s Hideaway yes, I'm a link...click...NOW! Wen has been attending this debate camp since she was in high-school and is now something of a guru/legend to the people who gather there. It used to be called "Camp Raynor", but has since been renamed the more alliterative, "Hitchcock's Hideaway". Same deal -- students and teachers of debate from across the province meet to practice their craft and socialize with others who are as socially awkward as they are. As a dad, I go along to enjoy the scenery and help give us just a little family time on a weekend where Wen works from 7am until 11pm with only scant breaks to eat the catered meals provided by the staff of this beautiful prairie retreat. I'm not going to say much about the trip. I think ...

It has been getting cold here in Saskatoon. Anybody else notice that? Got our first frost last night, and I increasingly am finding inside projects on which to work and I find that I don't want to bother watering the plants anymore because... well... they're gonna be on my compost pile in a few weeks anyway! There was a very nice warm day recently, though. It had me outside and excited. The bugs thought it was great too. This spider has been hanging out under our deck for a month and I finally caught him out sunning. Across the yard, one of his brethren was out for a walk... where he had an unfortunate run-in with local law enforcement. Let me just say that he resisted arrest and was dealt with harshly. However, the large clematis out back was the real hub of activity for the hungry -- perhaps second only to the great compost pile, itself. You can click the image below to see a few more pictures and my witty captions... Bugs