A wildlife adventure from the jungles of San Diego… part 1…

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Hello, this is your nature guide, Arthur, speaking to you from deepest, darkest San Diego California. Today, we will observe the splendor and terror that is nature in the wild.

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Hey kid, you might want to get out of the water.

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Even the big fish are fleeing!

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And the small fish are swimming in a circle, trying desperately to confuse the predators!

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I know, you didn’t think that San Diego had jungles. But it does, even though, technically, it is a desert.

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What bloody, ravenous nightmare is being enacted under those turbulent waters?

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As large fish turns upon small fish, to sate his savage hunger.

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In the wild, you must constantly look over your shoulder… wait, do fish have shoulders?

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The school of sleek, deadly carnivores grows, as they stalk their prey.

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The small fry abandon their circle, and flee, hoping to outrun their hideous destiny.

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Under the swaying palms and tranquil waters death death lurks in every shadow.

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Ready to pounce on the unwary.  Okay, I have to go, my food and fancy adult beverage with a tiny umbrella just arrived at the table.

Man, next time I go there to eat, I am bringing a bottle of red food-coloring. That would spice this story up.

 

 

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Oh come on, Arthur, more pictures of wet spider webs, seriously???… part 4… once again with special super-close-up-cropped portions of each photos below the original photo!!!

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Original.

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ZOOOOOM! I like that there are smaller strands between the main strands. Is there another, smaller spider sharing the web, or can this one make two sizes of web???

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Original photo.

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ZAP! I like the way that order is mixed with the chaos. No spider web is actually perfectly symmetrical.

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He got lazy in the middle.

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I guess he figured that, hey, that jerk is going to come out and spray my web with that stupid mister/spray bottle, so why should I bust my as… uh… abdomen??? And that is Mister stupid mister to you, spider!

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A perfectly nice picture.

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Sublime artistic transcendence.

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Nice.

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Nicer. I am still trying to figure out if I can somehow use my digital photographic microscope on a wet web… without getting the lens all wet.

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Meh…

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Oh, yeah!

 

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Another cool thing I did over the weekend, which isn’t really a weekend, because I work on weekends, so it was actually a Monday and a Tuesday, but I call it the weekend because it makes me feel like I have a weekend…

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I took a pottery class. This was on the day after our Legoland adventure with the adorable cousins. My daughters were still in town.

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My older daughter, Jessica, set this up. She is the one who got me into blacksmith classes and glassblowing. And made me a Scottish Lord. She signed me up for another glassblowing class for last Christmas, but the shop closed down, so she thought we could try this together, as long as she was visiting from New York.

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It was a charming little studio.

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The teacher showed us what to do.

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She made it look so easy.

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It is not easy.

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There I am, practicing with the foot pedal that gives you different speeds on the turning wheel.

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We made some stuff.

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Not overly impressive stuff.

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Jessica did better than me.

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I am hoping that when they finish slow drying, and I go back and put a kiln-fired glaze on them, they will be more exciting. Also, Jess is going to set up another lesson with me and my younger daughter, Mollie.

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Two awesome days of excellent adventures, with lots of pictures of cute kids… part 6… the final chapter… sort of…

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I say this is ‘sort of’ the final chapter, in so far as these are the last pictures of the day I went to Legoland with my little buddy, Olivia, pictured above, and with my cute little cousins and my two daughters.

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There is the newest little cousin, Maeve, being snuggled by my younger daughter, Mollie.

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But this was just one of my weekend days… which, as you may recall, fall on Monday and Tuesday.

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Love that kid.

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That is when she saw herself in the mirror.

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She is so sweet. She still has crazy hair from the water park.

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I love that my daughters got their faces painted.

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I don’t care that you got married and moved to New York, you rock that face paint, Jessica!

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Jessica and Olivia. I think I shared a picture of Mollie with her face painted already.

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On one of my working days, while both kids were still in San Diego, they went to a spa.

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Jessica knows how to pamper herself, and she has that New York cool now.

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And Mollie… Mollie is just Mollie.

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My girls.

Okay, I do have one more post coming, about the second day of my ‘weekend’, in which Jessica and I did something awesome. See you soon.

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Let’s build a wall… to keep Russia out of our freekin’ elections…

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Seriously, these people do not understand irony. Russia, the people that made idiots like these hide under tables when they were in elementary school, to prepare them for the nuclear weapons raining from the sky. I thought you people hated foreigners? Also, this sounds strangely treasonous to me. Send these two back. To Russia. Even if they have never been there before. They can wear the shirts there, I am sure they will be a big hit.

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Next time you are chanting ‘send someone back’, remember, it is only a matter of time until you get added to the’sending back’ list…

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Right now, the list is mostly people you don’t like anyway. If they were all gone, the list would remain. So, who gets added next? Send women back to the kitchen? Maybe it will be Irish and Italian Americans? Catholics? Americans serving in our government, people who were born here, are already on the list. Does the list include all African and Hispanic citizens, born here or not… even the ones who voted for Trump? Intellectuals, anyone who went to college? Who makes the list? I guarantee, it isn’t going to be you.

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This is what happens when you raise kids with all the money they want and none of the love they need…

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Let’s give white supremacists their ‘white homeland’… wait, follow along with me on this…

They just want a homeland where everybody looks like them. I think this is fair. The problem, as I see it, is that they actually believe that they can somehow get the entire United States to be white only. This is just absurd.

So, here is my plan. We give them what they want… sort of. We take the ‘whitest’ state in the country, build a wall around the worst part of it, and all the white people who want to be surrounded by only white people can move in. Trust me, nobody of any other race will come knocking on your gate.

You can call this your homeland. Or, we could call in a concentration camp for idiots. It amounts to the same thing. Think of it as a reservation for people with reservations about other races.

You can open up businesses, you can open banks and print your own money. And you can make and grow your own food. Here is the thing… (there is always a thing)… I bet you will find that a small percentage of you, the one percent, let’s call it, will do really well. The ones who own the farms and the stores and the banks. The rest of you will end up doing jobs that you hate, or not doing any job. And the truly ironic part is that you won’t be able to blame another race for keeping you down and taking your jobs. You will have to face the reality that it is you who is at fault for most of your problems, and nobody is going to come along and fix them for you. No moron in a magic red hat is going to come sweeping in and get you a better job or health care or education for your kids. No agency will make sure you have clean water or decent food to eat. You will have to spend time after your crappy work day to fix potholes in the roads and put up stop signs.

And I wonder how that meal tastes when you had to work in a field all day, in the hot sun, to pick the ingredients for low wages.

Let me know how that all works out for you. I could be wrong.

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Tripping the light fantastic… wait, what the heck is that?… part 8…

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Well obviously, that is a fancier version of this…

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And that is the same thing I made fancier versions of in the last few iterations of this series, but not in the earlier posts, nor will it be the same as what is coming up in future posts in this series. Got it?

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Oh come on, Arthur, more pictures of wet spider webs, seriously???… part 3…

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I decided to take some of the less exciting pictures I took and crop them way down to the good parts.

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Other than that…b 3

I guess this post doesn’t need much explaining.

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I annoyed some spiders…

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By spraying some water…

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I took some photos…

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And I did it all for you.

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You are very welcome.

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