Oops..

For some reason I forgot to update the page with this lovely treasury I made late last week - asyouknowBob, I was born in another country and only came here sometimes in the 1420's - and so I have lots of memories of that other place... not sure why I felt like I needed to make this, but I like it!


Anyway, the only reason I'm telling you this is so you can enjoy it before I replace it with the buggy one I'm about to make.  Enjoy indeed, soon all will be creeping and crawling and things that crawl up your nose in the night.


Enjoy, Gentle Readers!


Ciao.

Creepy Crawly Alert

I thought I'd put the non-bug type news first, so the faint-hearted amongst you can avoid it if you don't want to see what goes on in our garden.

I've finally dug out the beautiful fabric I bought in 2009 from here to make a tablecloth for My Best Friend, whose birthday was yesterday - Happy Birthday Deb! and I'm busy sewing french seams on the cloth:

 (Sometimes I hate blogger.  Why won't it put these in the middle?)

I really like these materials & hope MBF does too!  The first print is for the cloth, and the second print is for the border - there was much swearing yesterday when I was trying to work out what size to cut the border to acommodate the whole length (108" X 2 + 43" X 2) but I think I've got it.  I think.

OK, bug alert.  Stop reading now if you don't want to see spiders, half-eaten beetles and insect wars.


We tend not to call them 'critters', down here. They're just the local wildlife. We have an inordinate number of them, see here for details.  But don't look if you're faint-hearted.  We have the White-tail, Wolf, St Andrew's Cross, Redback and Huntsman in our garden, and the daddy-long-legs in our house.  Of all of them, it's the daddy-long-legs that annoy me the most - they make webs in the house, which attract - shock horror - dust.  And then we have cobwebs.  Once you've got them, too, it's almost impossible to get rid of them.  When we were first married, way back in the 17th Century, we didn't have them, then we moved into a rental apartment (which I hated, but that's a whole 'nother story) which had them, and bang!  We had them.  And we've had them ever since.  


Anyway, yesterday morning, Gentle Readers, I was hanging washing out in the garden, as we do here in Australia.  Out in the sunshine, as you will see from the photos.  The St Andrew's Cross spiders have started making their amazing multi-dimensional webs, and there's one right on the clothesline.  I don't mind this at all, because they catch flies and mosquitos, and as I'm still scarred from the sandfly plague, any help I can get from Mother Nature is fine with me.  I don't much like walking into the webs at night, particularly when they try & run over your face to get away.. but I digress.


The St Andrew's Cross spider had just shed its skin.  I didn't even know they did that.  But there it was, an empty skin, and a newly limp spider, just... hanging... there, waiting to warm up, or cool down, or whatever it is they do.  So I whipped back inside to get the camera.


It took me a few goes to get the camera to focus on the spiders and not the roof, the garden, the sky, but I finally achieved it:

Garden

Roof

More Garden

Yet more garden and finally...

Spiders.  Before and after!

Weird, huh?


Then, in another entomological moment, a beetle bit the dust just outside our back door, and made the ants happy for about 300 ant years:

This morning, there's only this left:

And the ants valiantly trying to drag an anntennae down the hole to their nest:

And last night, the battle of the bush spider versus the hornet - I'm not too fond of these little flying orange bundles of nasty, so I try to avoid them at all costs - which is why this was taken from behind my screen door (I'm not that brave!):

The poor paralysed spider is just outside my front door, being eaten alive by ants.  Ick.

And now, Gentle Readers, I must go & get in the shower (11.40am, just about time) & work on the tablecloth!

Have a wonderful (bug-free) Sunday.  Ciao!