Cisseps fulvicollis (Yellow-collared Scape Moth)

Photograph taken on Sunday, September 11, 2016 by Henry
Cisseps fulvicollis (Yellow-collared Scape Moth)

Cisseps fulvicollis (Yellow-collared Scape Moth)

After a hot week and an absolutely boiling day yesterday, today was wonderful. It made it up into the low to mid 80s and although my ideal outdoor temperature is more like 68°F, compared to nearly 100°F it felt cool by comparison. Cathy and I went out in the afternoon and had a nice walk in the woods. I found a few interesting things to photograph, including some flowers and a few different insects. This is a yellow-collared scape moth and it quite a pretty little thing, especially when seen against the bright yellow flowers of yellow ironweed (a.k.a. wingstem, Verbesina alternifolia).

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Diabrotica undecimpunctata (Spotted Cucumber Beetle)

Photograph taken on Saturday, September 10, 2016 by Henry
Diabrotica undecimpunctata (Spotted Cucumber Beetle)

Diabrotica undecimpunctata (Spotted Cucumber Beetle)

I was out looking for things to photograph today and happened to see a small, pink moth. It was only about 9mm long and I managed to get some reasonable pictures of it. I believe it’s a Pyrausta inornatalis, although the literature doesn’t mention it being here in Maryland. I’ve posted a picture to BugGuide to check my identification. In the meantime, here’s one I can identify. While I was down on the ground photographing the moth, I noticed this little beetle. it’s about the same length as the moth, under 10mm in length (not counting its antenae) but quite brightly colored. As the title of this post says, this is a spotted cucumber beetle (Diabrotica undecimpunctata). This is a major pest of many field crops including cucumbers and other squashes, corn, and soy.

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Canada Thistle

Photograph taken on Friday, September 09, 2016 by Henry
Canada Thistle

Canada Thistle

I’m anything but a fan of Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) in terms of its growth in our garden. That’s not, however, to say that it cannot be quite beautiful. I just wish it would be beautiful somewhere else. Its flowers are not nearly as showy as bull thistle (C. vulgare) and it’s quite hard to eradicate from a garden, once it’s gotten a hold there (which it does with relative ease). We pull a huge number of these every year and every year there seem to be more than the year before. There was a small pile of pulled thistle in the grass and I decided the seeds with their fluffy tufts of thistledown would be good for a picture or two. This is my favorite, not so much of the seeds and thistledown, but of the remains of the flowerhead and related structure. I think it’s quite lovely. Now get off my lawn!

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Sheba Ethiopian Restaurant

Photograph taken on Thursday, September 08, 2016 by Henry
TND at Sheba Ethiopian Restaurant

TND at Sheba Ethiopian Restaurant

For a little over a year our family has been having what we call Thursday Night Dinner (TND). It was initially ever week for a while but life gets busy and now it’s now and then, when people are available. This evening there were seven of us, Tsai-Hong, Ralph, Dot, Seth, Steve, Cathy, and me (not in the picture, because I was behind the camera, as I prefer). We had talked about going to a Thai restaurant. There is an Ethiopian restaurant next door and we figured we’d go to both on different weeks. Iris suggested we do Ethiopian tonight because she’s not fond of it and she couldn’t come tonight. She wants to go the Thai restaurant, when the times comes.

We had samplers with all sorts of dishes, ranging from mild to somewhat spicy. None of it was terribly hot. The best flavour, I think, was in two beef dishes. The first of those is kitfo, which their menu describes as “Ethiopian style steak tartar, seasoned to a rich flavor with our special blend of spices, spiced butter and mit’mit’a.” They will sear it for you, but we decided to go for the original.

The second that I really liked was tibs fitfit. “Tender beef cubes sautéed with onion, tomatoes, awaze and jalapeño mixed with injera.”

Actually, all of it was good and I ate more than I should have. Even so there was a lot left over.

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Hardy Begonia

Photograph taken on Wednesday, September 07, 2016 by Henry
Hardy Begonia

Hardy Begonia

A few years ago, Cathy had a pot with begonias in it, sitting on the corner of our front walk, just outside our front door. Now, the pot and its begonia are long gone, but the plant lives on, having moved itself out of the pot and into the ground around our front porch. It’s quite healthy and happy, with small, pink flowers and bright green leaves. I love both the texture and the shape of the leaves, as well as their color, which I think I mentioned is bright green. This spot seems perfectly suited to the plant, just the right amount of sun, protection, and the occasional watering, both natural and manual.

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Tenodera sinensis (Chinese Mantis)

Photograph taken on Tuesday, September 06, 2016 by Henry
Tenodera sinensis (Chinese Mantis)

Tenodera sinensis (Chinese Mantis)

I took a few pictures in the yard this evening and figured one of them would have to suffice for the day’s picture. Then later in the evening, as I was leaving the church office after meeting with the guys I saw this Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) on my car door. So, I grabbed my camera (most people carry their camera with them all the time, right?) and fitted the flash so I could take some mantid portraits. I got some that show the entire insect but I particularly like this one, which clearly shows the three occeli (simple eyes) in the center of the head, along with the two compound eye that we normally associate with insects.

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Gea heptagon

Photograph taken on Monday, September 05, 2016 by Henry
Gea heptagon

Gea heptagon

This is the same sort of spider I photographed just over two weeks ago (see Saturday, August 20, 2016) and may, for all I know, be the same exact spider. I was out this morning, not having to be at work because it’s Labor Day, and I saw her with the sun shining on her brightly. I got down on the dewy ground and set up my camera on a bean bag, fitted with the 100mm macro and a 25mm extension tube so I could get nice and close. This was taken at f/11.3 for 1/13 second and it isn’t quite as sharp as I’d like, but it’s not bad. This is one of the prettier spiders around and one I haven’t seen before a couple weeks ago.

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New Church Location, New Church Time

Photograph taken on Sunday, September 04, 2016 by Henry
Cross Community Church

Cross Community Church

Today was a significant day in the life of our young church (Cross Community Church / http://www.cross-community.org/). For the last 20 months, we’ve been meeting at First Baptist of Rockville, for 8 months in a room downstairs and then for a year in the sanctuary, always in the afternoon. We are and will always be grateful for their generosity to us but it was time for us to move to a morning church service and to do that, we needed to be somewhere else (they wanted to continue using their sanctuary in the mornings for their own service, which I suppose it reasonable). Starting this morning we had our first 11:00 AM service at the Rockville Senior Center (1150 Carnation Drive, Rockville, Maryland 20850 / 39° 06′ 00″ N, 77° 10′ 36″ W).

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New Computer

Photograph taken on Saturday, September 03, 2016 by Henry
My New Computer

My New Computer

As I mentioned in the post from Thursday, my main workstation at home crashed. Parts of it are still usable and I may turn it into a Window-only scanning workstation. But for now, I need to get Linux up and running and restore the files on the drive that was lost (a 3TB drive with pictures up through 2011). This is the new computer, pre-assembly. In the past I’ve bought the smallest case that will hold everything I need. This time, I decided to take a different approach. The case is huge. But it made assembly so much easier. I got an AMD FX processor with 8 cores, 16GB of RAM (which may be upped to 32GB at some point), a 120GB SSD for the boot drive and two 5TB hard drives for data (I may need a third soon, but there’s plenty of room in this case). I also have a GeForce GTX 760 graphics card. It will be powered by a 600 watt power supply. An hour and a half later, all the parts were in the case and I was ready to start the process of installing CentOS 7, an upgrade from 6, which I’m sure will cause some pain along the way, but I do have some experience with 7 already, so I should survive.

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Sunset Over The Pool

Photograph taken on Friday, September 02, 2016 by Henry
Sunset Over The Pool

Sunset Over The Pool

We don’t have a membership at our local swimming pool and this isn’t the pool in our neighborhood, in any case. Our church is moving to a new location and some friends who happen to live in the area of that new site decided to have a party at their pool and invite their friends and neighbors. Because they wanted to spend the evening visiting with their guests, they asked me if I’d cook for them and I was happy to do so. I still got to visit some, once the bulk of the cooking was done, and of course I took a few pictures.

In addition to this one of the sunset colored sky, reflecting in the pool, I got quite a few of kids blowing bubbles and also playing with glowsticks. It was a very pleasant evening, not too hot and not terribly humid. In fact, a perfect fall evening. Of course, we’ll have a return of summer next week but hopefully it won’t be too long before we get into autumnal mode, weather-wise.

Thanks to Tammy, Joe, Joan, Victor, and Sally for putting on a nice evening and thanks also for letting me be there, even though I live in a different part of town.

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Thistle (and Friend)

Photograph taken on Thursday, September 01, 2016 by Henry
Thistle (and Friend)

Thistle (and Friend)

Due to a workstation crash (from which I’m still recovering backed up data) I’m a week behind in posting here. This is the psot from last Thursday, September 1. It was a beautiful day and finally has cooled off considerably. The high today was in the mid 80s and it was wonderful. After work, Cathy and I took a walk in the woods near Lake Frank. I didn’t get a lot of pictures, but by the abandoned parking lot overlooking the lake, there were lots of thistles blooming. I like this picture and like it all the more for the moth that I didn’t see while I was taking the picture. It is an ailanthus webworm moth (Atteva aurea), and even out of focus as it is, it is quite distinctive with its pattern of orange, black, and white.

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Liriope Flowers

Photograph taken on Wednesday, August 31, 2016 by Henry
Liriope Flowers

Liriope Flowers

Liriope is a genus of grass-like, flowering plants from East Asia. It makes a nice ground cover when grown in quantity, although it’s fairly slow to fill in, so you’ll need to plant quite a few plants to really cover the ground. It’s also enjoyed by rabbits. We have some growing along the edge of a bed under a Colorado spruce and it gets eaten back fairly regularly. It generally recovers but who knows how it would look if it didn’t have to deal with that? The name comes from Greek mythology. To quote from Wikipedia, “Liriope is a Boeotian naiad, who was probably the daughter of one of the Boeotian or Phocian river Gods. Liriope was loved by the river-god Cephissus, who was himself the son of Oceanus and Tethys, and bore his son Narcissus.”

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Clouds and Sun

Photograph taken on Tuesday, August 30, 2016 by Henry
Clouds and Sun

Clouds and Sun

I was driving into Rockville today and had a little time to spare. I decided to go to the First Baptist cemetery at the corner of W. Jefferson Street and Great Falls Road. On the way there I was sitting at a light and saw these clouds. I had plenty of time (it’s a long red) and I grabbed my camera and got three nice pictures before I had to put the camera down and start driving again. I also got some nice pictures of the cemetery but I decided I like this one better.

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Hypena scabra (Green Cloverworm Moth)

Photograph taken on Monday, August 29, 2016 by Henry
Hypena scabra (Green Cloverworm Moth)

Hypena scabra (Green Cloverworm Moth)

This moth took a little stalking before I could get a good picture. When I first saw it and got a picture the shutter speed was too slow and the first two pictures were not very good. I upped the ISO to 2,000 and got this one at 1/60 second at f/5.7. It still isn’t as good as I’d like. I went inside to get my twin flash macro bracket but when I came back out the moth was nowhere to be found. I did get a few images of a tiny fly (in the Family Lauxaniidae) but I thought most of my followers would appreciate a moth rather than a fly.

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Abbie and Gracie

Photograph taken on Sunday, August 28, 2016 by Henry
Abbie and Gracie

Abbie and Gracie

This isn’t the most flattering picture I’ve even taken of these two sisters, Abbie on the left and Grace on the right. Actually, the reason I was taking pictures of them was to get one considerably less flattering still (at their request!). I had intended to post that one but decided I would not, after all. So, feel free to laugh and to poke fun at them. If you know what the other pictures was then you probably know where it can be found. Feel free to enjoy it there. Abbie and Grace, if you want to post that one, it’s okay by me.

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Asclepias Seeds

Photograph taken on Saturday, August 27, 2016 by Henry
Asclepias Seeds

Asclepias Seeds

It’s still summer here, but some things have finished blooming and moved into autumn mode. The various species of Asclepias in the yard is a good example, with its flowers having faded and with seed pods bursting with the characteristic silky, filament-like coma or pappus. As the seed pod opens and the coma dry out, they are borne by the wind and the seeds deposited far and wide (to grow as weeds in someone else’s yard. Actually, we’ve had some come up in our yard, which we consider a good thing. But you have to either recognize what a small Asclepias looks like or let your weeds grow a bit before you pull them.

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Euptoieta claudia (Variegated Fritillary)

Photograph taken on Friday, August 26, 2016 by Henry
Euptoieta claudia (Variegated Fritillary)

Euptoieta claudia (Variegated Fritillary)

I took more pictures of skippers today and fully expected that I’d post one of those here. But there were two variegated fritillaries (Euptoieta claudia) flitting around the yard (does that make them flitillaries?). For the most part I couldn’t get very close to them but once, as I was standing quite still, one landed within range and I got a half dozen shots in before it left. Most of them were not at an ideal angle but this one and one other turned out pretty well. The skippers are there all the time, so getting pictures of them can wait.

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Sunset

Photograph taken on Thursday, August 25, 2016 by Henry
Sunset

Sunset

I went out to take some insect pictures this evening but it was a bit dark to get anything worth much. I got a bunch of pictures of leaf hoppers but none of them were sharp and all were a bit of a disappointment. I was sort of resigned to post a picture that was only half way decent of a skipper.

It wasn’t a long time later that the sun began to set and I realize I’d have the opportunity to take some other pictures and save you all (both of you) from that. So, here’s a sunset, instead of the skipper.

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Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris)

Photograph taken on Wednesday, August 24, 2016 by Henry
Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris)

Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris)

It was getting on for dusk when we arrived at Laurie and Dave’s house this evening but we took a little time to enjoy their front garden with them before the light really started to drop. I took some nice pictures of anemone flowers (which I assume were Chinese anemone, Anemone hupehensis). Then just as we were about to go back inside the hummingbirds came buzzing around. There were two and they came quite close to us. I was able to get a reasonably good shot of a female ruby-throated hummingbird at 1/400 second at f/2.8 at an ISO rating of 1000.

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Some Serious Loafing

Photograph taken on Tuesday, August 23, 2016 by Henry
Huge Loaves of Bread, Rockland Bakery

Huge Loaves of Bread, Rockland Bakery

When we drive to or from the Boston area we often stop at the Rockland Bakery in Nanuet, New York for a bit of bread. Because we’re driving most of the day and it’s not a good idea to take pictures while driving, this is one of my few opportunities to take pictures on those days (I guess I could take pictures at a service area, but somehow…). In the past I’ve tried to come up with bread-themed jokes to go along with my picture (e.g., Home For The Challahdays). Today I’ll just feature a picture of some huge loaves of bread. I have to assume these are a special order item, being too long even for the shelf trolley they’re on. We settled for soft pretzels (which were just coming out of the oven) and a couple rolls. It’s a fascinating place and worth a visit, even if you don’t buy bread (but we always do, of course).

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