Mother Nature offers helping hand this week...
The conditions on Monday were just right for doing something I had not done in a while.
With the wind gusting up to around 50 miles per hour Monday afternoon, it seemed to make sense to toss some letters up into the air and see where they landed. It worked. Thank you, Mother Nature, for helping me to create this column.
At one point Monday when the wild winds were blowing, I looked outside and I’m pretty sure I saw a squirrel flying overhead. Not a flying squirrel. A squirrel which was flying through air, like the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.” The squirrel had a rather startled look on its face.*
By the way, I’m thinking that a couple of the cars which were behind me Monday morning while I was on the way to The Paragraph Factory on the first day of a new work week probably were going just a little bit faster than 50 miles per hour. I pulled onto a side road and let them go by. Folks, I really don’t understand why it is necessary to drive so fast. Slow down. Please. Whew. Got that out of my system.
Mother Nature and the world around us, and above us, too, assisted in the crafting of this week’s gem in a couple of other ways, too. One of her critters found itself in what seemed to me to be a rather surprising place last Sunday afternoon.
The critter was rather tiny and had eight legs. Yup. You guessed correctly. It was a spider. And somehow, it was climbing up a mirror in one of the rooms in our abode. How was it accomplishing such a feat with its eight tiny feet?
Well, perhaps the critter was bitten by a radioactive spider and acquired super powers. Oh, wait, that’s Spider-Man. I was looking at a real, live genuine arachnid.
Some quick research on the internet (of course) helped me out. According to quora.com: “Spiders have unique adhesive properties on their feet called setae, which allow them to cling to a variety of surfaces, including smooth glass. These setae are tiny hair-like structures that can adhere to surfaces through van der Waals forces, which are weak attractive forces between molecules.”
Quora, by the way, is “a question and answer platform that allows users to ask and answer questions about anything.” Wish Quora was around when our kids would ask “Why?” over...and over...and over...
After taking a photo or two of Willy the spider climbing up Mt. Mirror, I set him (her?) free in the great outdoors. I decided to call the spider Willy just because I did set him (her?) free. Just like in the movie. The one about an orca. Not a spider. Sorry.
I was back in the great outdoors late Sunday night. I ventured out in the dark to catch a glimpse of a penumbral lunar eclipse which happened in the sky above. The earthsky.org website had informed me that the eclipse would begin at 11:53 p.m. our time. The eclipse reached its peak at 2:12 a.m. Monday morning. I missed the peak.
“A penumbral lunar eclipse is the most subtle kind of lunar eclipse,” earthsky.org explained. “Some will look at the moon and swear the eclipse isn’t happening.”
To be honest with you, I really couldn’t see much happening to the moon. But when I took a peek into the night sky, the eclipse was only about 10 or 20 minutes old. And moments after I managed to take a couple of photographs, the moon vanished behind a layer of clouds. Hopefully that won’t happen on April 8...
That’s about it for this week...
Oh...Happy Easter...
(*The writer made this up. It wasn’t a squirrel. It was an armadillo...or maybe a pig...)