A few days ago I was putting away the trampoline for the winter and I came across this big dirty spider. It had a big body and some interesting markings on it. I did a bit of Internet research, and I think it’s an orb-weaving spider. Perhaps a “shamrock orb weaver”. Either way, it was super gross, so I just had to take a couple of pictures…
It’s true. This site has gone all insecty. Back at the end of July, I noticed a bunch of ants having a crazy ant party on this one particular spot on my lawn. Like, a LOT of ants. I’m not sure what they were all going crazy over, but there were tons of them, and they were crawling all over each other. It was interesting to look at, but kinda creepy. That many ants shouldn’t be together at the same time.
Check out this low quality Youtube video first, followed by a picture. If you look closely, you can see some ants crawling at the beginning. At the end of the video, that large dark blob area is actually a bunch of ants.
Sometime during the summer, I found this crispy dried up dragonfly lying on my front walkway. It was all brittle and weird looking, with a body like a twig or stick. It also had weird bluish colours on it. If you look closely, these things are pretty gross.
Around this time last year, Durham Region started up its green bin program. We put kitchen scraps into a green bin, which gets picked up and composted as part of a waste diversion program. I think it’s a good idea, but when we first started it last year, we had a little issue with maggots:
