Just trying this on for size. What better way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon than trying out a new look?

Let me know if you think it’s awful.

From DivaKitty and the Fluffies and perfect on a mindless Friday night after a very looong week at work.

Put your iPod on shuffle and blog the first twenty songs in the shuffle.

1. Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself – Luka Bloom
2. Angel – Sara McLachlan
3. Nightingale – Norah Jones
4. The Long Day is Over – Norah Jones
5. Come Away With Me – Norah Jones
6. Forgiveness – Luka Bloom
7. Boondocks – Little Big Town
8. Bring It On Home – Little Big Town
9. Something More – Sugarland
10. Come a Little Closer – Dirks Bentley
11. Rainbow Warrior – Luka Bloom
12. Turn Me On – Norah Jones
13. Blackberry Time – Luka Bloom
14. Lot of Leavin’ Left to Do – Dirks Bentley
15. I’ve Got to See You Again – Norah Jones
16. Days Go By – Keith Urban
17. Home – Michael Buble
18. Your Body is a Wonderland – John Mayer
19. Must Be Doin’ Something Right – Billy Currington
20. Pay Me My Money Down – Bruce Springsteen

If anyone would like to play along – have a go at it! I find it really interesting to discover what kind of music people like listening to – always a surprise. My iPod is pretty new so there aren’t very many songs on it. The mix is fairly eclectic; quite a bit of Irish alternative and folk music, some country, some jazz, some pop. The last song I downloaded was Bruce’s “Pay Me My Money Down” – I love the feel of that song.

I only use my iPod at work when I want to tune out all the chatter around me. It helps me concentrate to not have to overhear everyone’s personal phone calls and extended whining sessions. There has been an awful lot of that crap lately and entirely too much foolishness. I’m having flashbacks to when I was teaching kindergarten. Not kidding! Makes me want t0 change careers and pick vegetables for a living.

Following my junior year in college I spent the summer in Spain. It occurs to me that the 15 years between that summer and now has passed in a flash! Where does the time go?

I remember being excited to go, but so very scared. I was a Spanish major and my college sponsored the trip in conjunction with the University of Madrid. I had classes four days a week in the mornings and the afternoons and weekends free for travel and sightseeing. Looking through the photo album I made, it seems that I saw very little of the country, outsiide of the areas surrounding Madrid where I lived. This photo taken outside the Plaza de Toros de las Ventas bullring in Madrid is my favorite; I think because it reminds me of my Uncle “Doc” who grew up in Barcelona. Either one of those men could be him. A copy of the poster advertising that Sunday’s corrida hangs on my sunporch. Bullfighting is controversial, even in Spain, but I’m glad to have had the experience of seeing a few. I only wish we hadn’t bought the cheap seats – the Spanish sun is incredibly strong even late in the day.

We visited an inordinate number of churches, most of them much more ornate than this one in Segovia, a spectacular old town set high on a rocky cliff and surrounded by two rivers. We saw the castle-like Alcazar and the Aqueduct built by the Romans during the 1st century. My most vivid memory from this town is buying a beautiful handmade lace tablecloth for my sister-in-law from a gypsy who tried to steal my camera after I had paid her.

We spent a lot of nights in bars, but we were college students and that’s what one does is Spain. The custom is to have a late supper around 10 pm when the sun finally sets and head out for the evening sometime after midnight. This made being in class at 8 am pretty difficult, but I found that by staying up all night I wouldn’t oversleep and miss class. I’d go to class and then spend the afternoon sleeping by the pool. I often missed the big meal of the day around 2 pm, so was always hungry. Sundays were my favorite day because the cafeteria at the school was closed and we went to a chain restaurant that served spaghetti (my favorite!) Hungry, but I had a great tan that summer. The pic at left shows us drinking milk and orange juice 😉 shortly before I returned home to NJ. I’m almost as dark as my Spanish friends, but the red-haired girl clearly didn’t spend enough time by the pool!

My favorite city was Salamanca, where we spent a weekend and treated ourselves to an expensive hotel with air-conditioning and room service. Quite a treat after dormitory living! Salamanca is a breathtakingly beautiful city, where the quality of light is somehow magical, especially at dusk in the Plaza Mayor; built of a warm golden sandstone. We spent most of our time there, eating and people-watching. Very late in the night I took this photo of people dancing in the middle of the square.

I would love to return someday and see the south of Spain, and the northern regions, and Barcelona. There is so much that I didn’t see and a lot of what I saw I couldn’t really appreciate because of my youth. Years of summer jobs and my dad’s generous nature made the trip possible. I’m still amazed that he let me go. Some day I’ll post more about that.

Cicadas are noisy now that the heat of summer is upon us. Hal Borland compares their shrills to “the twanging of a taut and ragged nerve at the peak of a galling summer day, a quiver so painful that you wince a quarter of a mile away”. I don’t mind their noise so much; as kids we always called them *heat bugs* because their calling coincides with the hottest parts of the day.

I was sitting out on the screened patio this evening having coffee when this one flew into the Rose of Sharon hedge nearby. These are big bugs and so very clumsy in their flying! I’ll admit to being a bit afraid of them; as I was taking pics of it I kept repeating over and over, “please don’t fly at me… please don’t fly at me” – of course I spooked it (and it, me) and it took off out of the hedge and I went in the opposite direction.

A few years ago we inadvertently attracted Cicada- Killer Wasps when we replaced our concrete driveway with pavers. The loose dirt was attractive to these digging wasps and I often watched them as they dragged a cicada into their nest burrows in the loose dirt beside the driveway.

Later I wandered into the garden to pick a few grape tomatoes and some basil and found the shed skin of a cicada nymph on the underside of a tomato leaf. I can remember one summer during my childhood when the willow tree in our backyard was covered with the shed skins of thousands of cicada nymphs. My older brothers terrorized me for all of that summer, tossing the crinkly skins at me and putting them in my hair. Propbably explains why I’m scared of them even now.

Take a cold shower

Drink plenty of fluids

Find a shady spot for a nap

Take a dip as often as necessary

This herb is something of a mystery. I purchased it a few years ago at a local native plant nursery because I had read that it was a good plant to attract pollinators. It was labeled only as *mountain mint* and I’ve not been able to figure out today what variety I have. It looks like it might be short-toothed mountain mint, but I’m not very sure of that.

It’s a nondescript plant and doesn’t *do* much more than you see in these pics – no big showy flowers here. Just these tiny white ones that seem mostly to attract equally tiny flying insects that I can’t identify. It’s growing among the swamp milkweed, joe pye weed, and bee balm so it tends to disappear among its more showy neighbors. I like the cool green color of the foliage.

I found quite a few references to the medicinal properties of this plant and one reference stated that it was believed by Native Americans to have strong medicine capable of *reviving the dead*.

I’m not in the mood to fight with Blooger tonight to get it to post more than one pic, so I’m sharing this weird mosaic/hockneyed photo collage I made on Flickr. I’ve always wanted a lace-cap hydrangea and fell in love when I saw this one; a macrophylla/serrata cross. The larger outer flowers have serrated edges which is what attracted me to it – they start out a pretty lime-green and mature to a soft cream color. It should be gorgeous as it gets larger.

I’m using it to replace the Winterthur Viburnum that I planted last fall that died. I’ve given up on trying to grow them – the one surviving is struggling; it has hardly put out any leaves this year, but I’m trying to baby it to keep it going. Hopefully I’ll be more successful with this shrub – it’s planted in moist shade which it should like. We’ll see.

Both my husband and I took the day off from work to go crabbing – I was looking for an excuse to play *hooky* and he offered. It was a beautiful day today – hot, but without the humidity that has been so oppressive all week. Our usual spot to crab is from a little bridge over the Swimming River in Red Bank – further down the river past the railroad bridge you see in the pic this river becomes the Navesink, five miles or so downriver is Sandy Hook Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

Crabbing requires little investment or preparation, but is a very repetitive pastime. We set up twenty or so traps across the span of the bridge, excepting the middle part of the bridge where our trap lines would interfere with the boat channel below. I watched and took pictures at this point, rather than handle the bait (fish or raw chicken) – left that yuckiness to my DH and his brother. The rest is easy – check the trap every so often, lifting it from the bottom hand-over-hand, and seeing what you’ve caught. There is a 4 1/2-inch minimum size, measured point to point across the back and we throw back any females we catch.

The majority of what we caught today were too small to keep, and these little ones usually fall out of the trap as you pull it out of the water. The keepers present somewhat of a challenge to me, as they often just won’t be flipped into the bushel basket like a cooperative crab ought to. Instead, they find something to hold onto and won’t let go. Shaking the whole trap works, but then you have a crab running around your Teva-sandaled feet. My husband just catches them under his shoe, but he wears steel-toed boots. Crabs can pinch painfully, even drawing blood, and the claws should definitely be avoided!

Here my husband is demonstrating to me the proper technique for holding a crab by the base of one of its swimming appendages called “swimmerets” or “paddles” located at the rear of the shell. My husband tells me the big, snapping male blue claws aren’t able to reach around and nip a finger this way. Once you have a hold of them and are sure the size is big enough and that it’s a male you can then flip it into the basket. Adding a crab into the bushel causes the others to scurry around threateningly – that snapping, lunging mass is no place for your hand! You have to keep the basket in the shade and the crabs moist with a wet towel, but they’ll live with proper ventilation for a few hours until you get them home to the pot.

We ended the day with 50 or so keepers for my husband’s mom and terrific sunburns. My shoulders and the backs of my knees are red like a lobster – sleeping should be interesting for the next few nights.

If you’ve followed the comments on my bad photo post, you might’ve noted that Pam from Tortoise Trail did a little work on the photos. I thought it might be interesting to share the results of her *playing* – hope you don’t mind, Pam!

It feels a bit like cheating to post the same photos twice, but I think you’ll agree that these images are hardly the same. I’m amazed with what photo-processing software can accomplish. I routinely use a basic processing program that is free with my ISP to crop and brighten some of my photos, but I had considered these photos beyond my skills for repair. I also use PhotoShop once in a blue moon to play around with and soften a pic, but that program is so very complicated; learning to use it seems daunting. Being a lover of books, I would really appreciate it if someone out there could suggest a practical guide to improving digital pics – let me know if there is a book that has been helpful to you.

Pam also made a guess at the last (and worst) bird photo. She guessed Seaside Sparrow, but I think it’s a Salt Marsh Sharp-Tailed Sparrow. Patrick is that right?