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Maybe you remember this and maybe not, but December the 21st is the Winter Solstice, the day when the length of days begins to increase. So if you have been suffering a pang of sadness each evening leading up to then, noting that the sunset seemed awfully early, and the evening very near, well then, pang no more! For this year at least. Now the people at the Antipodes may note sadly that the sunset seems earlier each day, but we Northern Hemisphereans will have (if we can but fix our minds on the fact) later and later sunsets for some good time. So good cheer about that for now!
This may come to you as something of a surprise, but for the few minutes that I was able to stand being out in the coolish air using my cellphone as a flashlight, it seemed that ONLY SPIDERS were brave enough to stand there and be photographed. Here is a Tuberculated Crab Spider (Tmarus angulatus), and then a couple of views of one in genus Tetragnatha (Stretch Spiders). These tiny fellows (I mean these VERY VERY SMALL fellows) were in almost total darkness except for the light from the phone. So here, these are for you, Biddy. Lest you think I'm playing favorites, Biddy is just one of the people who always cheer when I post a Spider! And so you can register yourself on the Spider Team and I'll post them to you too!
Here are the Thistle seedlings from last week and this week ( December 18). They grew quite a bit over the intervening week. I've ordered peat pots for the larger ones to try to grow till Spring.
The Pond has been freezing and thawing over the weeks. In the past couple of days, it has been mostly frozen (except for the small hole made in the ice by the small heater). Here we see it on December 12.
On the 19th. How did it get so GREEN?
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