On the evening of Thursday the 14th, I was working at the computer on some photos. Around 10:00 I decided I wanted to take more photos. My macro lens was still on my camera, so I decided to shoot macro. I didn't particularly want to take more snail and insect photos, so I went around inside my home looking for things to take pictures of.

The first thing I found that I thought would make a good photo was a duck feather that I've had around for a while. I had picked it up on one of my outings. Up close, feathers are quite interesting.

That's the side of a book.

I next found a length of nylon rope that I keep with a ball tied into one end to use as a cat toy.

The ball on the end is actually made from the rope; it's a big spherical knot known as the Monkey's Fist Knot. The Monkey's Fist is often used to give weight to the end of a line that will be thrown, such as the line you throw from ship to shore when you want someone to tie up your boat.

Although I had gotten a few good photos, I wasn't feeling particularly inspired by this indoor stuff. I looked around some, and, as is often the case when I'm not inspired, couldn't seem to find anything I wanted to shoot. After a few minutes, I settled on a candle. Just to keep it easy, I didn't light it.

But I had reached my fill of indoors, and determined that I should head outside, even if it meant more snails and bugs.

Sure enough, when I got outside, I found snails and bugs. I took a lot of shots, but I'm going to spare you some boredom by omitting the ones that are too similar to others that I've sent recently.

So here are the three remaining shots of Grovesnails. This first one is very up-close and personal, giving you a good look at their beautiful leopard-skin-like coat.

There's some fascinating theoretical work on animal skin patterning by people including notables Alan Turing (considered the father of modern computation) and Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Laureate in chemistry). The work concerns itself with a mathematical model for the interaction of two chemicals, with the eventual concentration of one of the chemicals determining the patterns we see. The model can explain things from cheetah spots to zebra stripes to snail skins, but, unfortunately, it remains a theory—no-one has yet discovered the actual mechanism at work.

At this point, I stood in a nature- and science-induced reverie for quite some time, thinking of Turing and Prigogine and stripes and spots and melanin and differential equations and irreversibility and codebreaking and evolutionary developmental biology and other weighty matters with appropriate scientific-sounding names. I'm sure that I thought something profound in the middle of it all, but I'm bad at remembering details and there wasn't anyone recording my thoughts. As a result, sadly, humankind must make do without my profundity. It's a terrible loss, and they're probably really sore about it, so remind me to be especially nice to humankind for the next little while.

Anyhow, I shook myself from my reverie with thoughts of doing more photography. I started walking around the building, looking for more subjects, and it wasn't long before another snail presented himself. When I found him, he was moving his eyestalks around and I wondered just how I would be able to tell if he was looking at me.

I suppose that that is how I can tell if a snail is looking at me.

It was night out, and I was finding my subjects with the help of a little white l.e.d. light on the flash units for my camera. Aside from snails, the other things that I found a lot of in my l.e.d. beam were Sowbugs. Sowbugs are not insects (they've got too many legs for that) but are another type of arthropod, similar to the bugs I once knew as pillbugs or rolly-pollies. The sowbug that seems to be predominate around here is Porcellio scaber, which is easy to identify, as it has little bumps all over its shell, whereas other sowbugs don't. So this fellow is a P. scaber.

Just for fun, I turned that photo upside-down; I actually found the weevil on the lower side of a little outcrop of cement, not the upper side.

The rest of my walk around the building just yielded the usual suspects, so I didn't take many more photos. Since I had some decent ones in the can already, and I was feeling a bit tired and groggy, I called it a night.

Now reacting quite diffusely,
Tom