I right-clicked on a picture, copied the image location, then manually added <img>link</img> to display. Replace < with [ to make the code active

Spiders in the brush.

<img>https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipP2UHZmuaueDHRjVqhBBOnIKum8uEY2il20Qj6jVzeLu8NmpOyf22Kbdz_NLQu36Q/photo/AF1QipPvMD8VTWfoC7g9wWJbE8Yl30ij3layQi9pLpj2gr_?key=c2ctTGxFRFA2WU14ZFU4REtKRHl0dV9BelRnNHlB</img&gt;

UncleMac wrote: »

I right-clicked on a picture, copied the image location, then manually added <img>link</img> to display. Replace < with [ to make the code active

Thank you for trying to help me, Mac!

I tried the [] and the photo did not display. So I used <> and that works - sort of. Posting photos on this site is a lot bigger pain in the *kitten* than it should be. I'm done for today.

Spider spider burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Designed thy dark web's symmetry

We played our penultimate match on Thursday. Yes, it was the second to last game of summer season. So sad. We lost pretty badly, but we had a GREAT game. The team we played was fun, had good spirit, was talented & fast, and gave us a great time. Too bad we don't get to play 'em again until next year.

Outdoor exercise is great, and a friend just forwarded an article suggesting that exercising outdoors is better for stress than indoors! Get out there~

My buddy called me Saturday evening. I was enjoying a pint with some friends. He said he and his wife were going to do the drift dive at Florence at 08:00. I told him I sure wasn't going to make THAT dive. They like to do two dives with the drift first as the flood tide comes to a halt and the crab hole at slack. I have one of my two bottles in the shop for hydrostatic testing and visual inspection, so I could only do one dive. If my buddy had called earlier, he probably could have gone to pick up my other bottle... Oh well. I'm so glad he called, because I haven't dove the crab hole in quite some time.

The Crab Hole is the second dive park in Oregon. Or the first. There's another in Woahink Lake a few miles away that's pretty shallow but has some interesting features underwater to navigate to. The entry for the Crab Hole used to be a fish ladder for a hatchery. It was revamped to make an easy entry.



A fun thing happened on the way over. Something I've only ever experienced once before on my truck. All the numbers on the odometer matched! I'm a palindrome junkie....



Visibility wasn't terrible. It was crab-tacular! It was maybe eight feet... maybe a little less. It didn't help that there was an open water class going out to the crab hole to stir things up. I found a nice stainless steel gaff as well as a nice piece of fishing tackle -- a flasher on a spreader with a nice drop weight. It was pretty recently lost, and I gave it to my buddy who can use it when he trolls for salmon. I kept the gaff.



I also got two crabs. Even that was a bonus since there were quite a few folks diving plus boats throwing pots. I hate crab pots falling on me.... There were some big females and lots of small crabs. I found one nice big legal male, but it was too soft, so I let it go home. I got a couple legals, one pretty big and one just a little bigger than legal.

I'm glad I remembered to fill my 5-gallon water cooler jug with HOT water before driving over. Nothing like having five gallons of hot, FRESH water when you get out of 46-degree sea water! Warm your hands, rinse your regulator, and even get some crud off your suit when you take it off. Then... fill with fresh seawater to cook your crabs! Only thing better would have been if I packed my cooker with me and cooked 'em right there by the sea.

I ~REALLY~ thought after last week's rain the lobster mushrooms would be up along with the porcini. So I went on a side trip through the coast range on a foray. I didn't find a single lobster. I did find one russula, but it wasn't "lobsterized." What did surprise me was seeing a chanterelle cap through the moss. Ummm... it's too early for that. I got a handful and headed back to the truck. I made a couple more stops and got a couple more handfuls. I didn't even carry a collecting bag, and in fact was just wearing shorts and Keen sandals. So it's not like I was really pounding the trail, but I did spend about two hours and covered two hilly miles. Then at my last stop I found WHITE chanterelles. I find them occasionally in the Cascades, but usually not in the Coast Range. A bonus -- the mushrooms were dense and dry since it's still August! That will be a bonus the next few days.



I cooked my crabs last night and ate the little one. It was really delicious. I also had some avocados that were absolutely perfect, so I had some of those. I guess stomping up and down the hills and schlepping my dive gear around did burn some calories! And I can't eat while I'm diving or on a foray. Some neighbors came by while I was cooking because the kids were super curious. That's fun because those neighbors don't generally come to talk, so I'm glad to foster better relationships with others in my little part of our village.

I took a short detour on the way home -- about six miles. I go through a town that has decent men's clothes at Goodwill. The local thrift shops get really picked over since we're a college town. I found some shirts, and.... believe it or not, a SPG (pressure gauge) for diving! There were three very old regulator sets for like nine bucks. None were even rated for the pressure bottle I use. There was also a console boot that only had one gauge in it -- an SPG. I gave the staff my driver license, went out to my air bottle, an tested the gauge. Holy Cats! It works. That means if I sell my old regulator set, it can go with all the gauges it needs, and I can still have a spare SPG in case my console computer fails on a long trip.

I need more weekends like this! So glad I got to sleep in Saturday and then get so many chores done I could take the day on Sunday to go dive/hike and spend the last day off finishing up chores and shopping. Yay!

@mtaratoot - you are a man of many talents! The harvest looks absolutely beautiful! We haven't been as lucky, despite having a greenhouse! Our tomatoes are still green, peppers look good, still small. Cucumbers have been great and yummy. Carrots are tiny, beans coming in slow, zucchini not great.

Fall arrived with a vengeance on Sept. 1. Leaves are changing and the nights are very cool. Not sure how much more we are going to be able to get. Am gonna start looking for green tomato recipes. lol.

It certainly was a terrible tragedy about the loss of life on the dive boat. Sure glad it was not you.

Haven't been on here much, life has been so darn busy. September is insane with work travel. Am really hoping I can just slow down soon.

Still high summer here in southwest Missouri, USA. Heat isn't abnormal, upper 80s to mid 90s F (30 to 35 C), but the humidity has been killer. Very unusual for the mid-west. Dew points above 70 F (21 C), very muggy, pushing the Heat Index over 100 F (38 C) nearly every day since mid June.

Makes me think we've moved down into the sub-tropical southern swamps.

We had a pretty small group at the aquarium. I didn't even get wet. Well, just a little from handling wet gear and putting it in/out of the rinse tanks. I volunteered to do deck manager duty for the first dive and was planning to switch with someone for the second dive. Then another team member showed up... 90 minutes late. So I could have gone and done a dive, or he could have. Instead we had two people on deck supporting one dive team. Waste of our time. We sneaked in a short second dive to clear a bunch of fish from the observation pool back into the pelagic (open sea) exhibit. The two divers who were already in their kit did this along with staff. The other two on the team plus a couple more staff operated the seine net and the gate. We got ALL the animals out in one pass. Success! I actually got some pictures, but that's proprietary so I'm not posting 'em here. Against policy, but it was an interesting job. I finally got my kit on to do a dive, but the other person had some issues with equipment, so we scrubbed the dive. No diving for me. Oh well.

Since we haven't changed the time back to standard yet, I had plenty of daylight to go to the forest. We had about a half inch of rain in the valley the last couple days, and a lot more over on the coast and in the coast range. I know that with the warm weather later this week, it will be a good weekend to forage for mushrooms. I figured since I was already in the area, I'd go stomp around.



Looks like it was worthwhile. I got my limit of a gallon. I left many more than I harvested. Some were getting old and soggy, so I limited my hunting to choice specimens. Some were too small, but they will be full sized soon. I like the small to medium sized ones best, but some of these were TINY. I found only one lobster mushroom, but it wasn't even the whole mushroom. It was the base of the stipe and some trimmings from around the outside. It was pretty obvious someone had already been hunting this site which means I had to get off the game trails and look under ferns and other brush. There used to be a lot more salal on this site, but I think it gets harvested pretty heavily by commercial hunters just like the mushrooms do.

Met a friend one day while working to work.