Living in the jungle

You know I live in an ordinary US Suburban neighborhood, right?  But living in the suburbs or even in urban areas doesn't mean there's no wildlife. 

Does your yard have wildlife?  Mine does.  Starting small, we have the Halloween contingent.  This spider is starting to ramp up for their big holiday.  Every year she (or some ancestor or descendant) festoons my front stoop with a big (and beautiful, I might add) web.  Spiders, as you probably learned in school, do control other insect life so they aren't a bad creature to have around.

Here's another pest control agent, the praying mantis.  This particular one was found hanging out on a garbage can that I use as a weed collection bin.

These dudes are hard to spot when they are "stalking" your broccoli, if you're a gardener, but they, too, feast on other bugs.  They won't munch on your veggies.  But wash the veggies when you harvest them, anyway!

The final one I'll show you is the yellow jackets, building their nest under my deck rail.  They got washed off back when I had the deck re-stained.  That was a few years back.  They have come back.  One nest over the back deck light, another under the deck rail... got lots of these critters.  They do pollinate the flowers, so I haven't destroyed them.

I guess it all goes along with having the most murderous of species allowed in the house.  But the felines do take care of the rodent population.  In a mafioso kind of sense.  Rubia the jungle cat was hanging out by the garden hose when I got back from a run one day.  

That's it for today's photo shoot around the house!  

Meanwhile, in the "jungle" of the wider web outside of Spark People... some of us are still learning to use Blogger.  I had a pleasant phone call from our friend up in Canada, trying to figure out how to reply to comments we leave on her blogs... that was today's lesson.  Often kind advice from others on how to do something on line, confuses a body, if she's not on the same web page / tool where folks assume she is.

In such cases, I have encouraged her to call me, and I feel incredibly privileged that she trusts me to help out.  I ask her what she sees on the screen, then I figure out where that is and how to get her to the starting point of the action she wants to take.  It's all about context and navigation!

From today on, if you have commented on her blog, you can go back to that same blog to see if she's left you a response.  I've been asked this one many times, but unfortunately, I have no idea how to "make" blog spot send you notification when the author responds to your comment.  I know you can use the "Notify" checkbox, but then you don't just get when the author writes back to you, you get every other comment and comment response to that blog, from the point when you checked it onward, too.  That can get VERY busy!

I stopped doing that, and just go back and check every so often.  If anyone else knows how to get this kind of notification from blogger, please let me know!  

Now let's get out there and live in our own little jungles... where the challenges are the foods that call our names, the news channels, our to-do lists, etc., etc., etc.  Let's live the best we can to take care of ourselves and our health, this one and only Tuesday, August 24, 2021 we'll ever get!  Because we're worth it, out here in the post-Spark world, just as we were when we lived in the calm waters of Spark itself.

Life is good!  Let's have a little more adventure before dementia, eh?  Spark on!💖🎇✨