In our previous visit we ended up in the southern boardwalks of Weedon Island. This time we were in the northern half. These were taken on Aug 22.

Mike noticed this yellow crowned night heron. None of my pictures turned out particularly well, but it’s a cool bird, and not as commonly seen as great blue herons (this is my second sighting. The first was at Caledesi Island in December.)

More death pictures! This is a golden silk spider. Mike, and other people, call them banana spiders. The legspan on the females is 3-4″. This is the first time I’d seen one, but they were all over the park this visit. Their bite is not lethal, but I’d still rather not run into one of them.

Common buckeye butterfly that was flitting along with us. We also saw a zebra longwing, but my only picture of it was unsightfully blurry.

I’ve yet to see any live ones, but these are the shells from horseshoe crabs, which are actually distant relatives of spiders, and have been around for 445 million years.

These are mangrove roots poking up from a pool of water, for breathing I think. You can see a few of the magrove seeds, in this and the horseshoe crab picture. This was a cool anecdote from wiki:

Mangrove seeds are buoyant and therefore suited to water dispersal. Unlike most plants, whose seeds germinate in soil, many mangroves (e.g. Red Mangrove) are viviparous, whose seeds germinate while still attached to the parent tree. Once germinated, the seedling grows either within the fruit (e.g. Aegialitis, Acanthus, Avicennia and Aegiceras), or out through the fruit (e.g. Rhizophora, Ceriops, Bruguiera and Nypa) to form a propagule (a ready-to-go seedling) which can produce its own food via photosynthesis. The mature propagule then drops into the water which can transport it great distances. Propagules can survive desiccation and remain dormant for over a year before arriving in a suitable environment. Once a propagule is ready to root, its density changes so that the elongated shape now floats vertically rather than horizontally. In this position, it is more likely to lodge in the mud and root. If it does not root, it can alter its density and drift again in search of more favorable conditions.

More mangrove roots. Usually the water around mangrove roots isn’t moving this fast. I think the little bumps on the roots are lenticels, also for breathing.

We saw at least 4 racoons. The first two ran away fairly quickly, but the others were alarmingly tame.

Mike took this one of a white ibis. It turned out way better than any that I took. Then we ran out of camera batteries. On the platform behind the ibis we watched a large school of jumping mullet.

August is the wettest month here, averaging eight inches in total. We have three and a half so far. When it rains, it is usually heavy but does not last long. Very rarely is the whole sky one mass of indeterminate grey.

So I haven’t had to water much the last few days. Unfortunately, an anole leaped into our watering can recently, and then drowned. I dumped the water out, and hopefully something hungry has found the morsel of lizard left in the grass. I’m not sure what around here only catches live prey, and what will take already dead creatures. We haven’t seen the snake in a while, nor the bunny rabbit. Not that the rabbit would be interested in dead lizard.

So I’ve not been taking that many pictures lately. But here’s a butterfly that I noticed chilling while I checked on the plants in the backyard in the orangy evening light (at the edge of what the camera and I can manage):

From the trusty Audubon book, I think that this is a black swallowtail.

Since I get up late, rushing in to work, Mike’s been doing the daily watering. There’s not much to see at this point. Our tomatoes are done. The chives still have two or three strands each. We’ve been using the basil sparingly (the purple variety’s leaves do look really cool). The small lettuces are bolting. The peppers each have a fruit, but they aren’t growing much. One stem of the passion flower has survived, though we are getting no more flowers. We periodically spray the fig, which should be repotted but I’m hesitant to do so, since that seems to kill most things. Even two of the indoor plants are dead or near dead, and not for any obvious mistreatment on our part. Unless this gets significantly easier in the winter, I’m going to have to find myself a new hobby.

My second after college, being all adult-like from 8-5 job, anyway.

This place is much smaller than my first after college job. I will, after many mistakes and requests to remind me again, learn every developer’s name, and those of the QAs and BAs too. People say hi in the maze of hallways more. It’s a bit chaotic (why is this person’s name on this ticket?). There’s no documentation to speak of. I could really, really use a data structure map of the main databases.

My work wardrobe is a notch too dressy for this place, and two or three notches too warm. But I won’t complain about getting to wear jeans any day of the week. As a result of some business partnership, we are called leased-employees in the handbook, which strikes me as one of the worst names they could have chosen. It feels really weird to being driving to work. All these stoplights, waiting, without being able to read or zone out. At least parking is free.

I’m just thrilled to be in a bunch of actual developers. Everyone speaks the same language, and I have people to ask questions of. (A lot of questions right now.) I don’t know enough to be useful yet, but I feel a lot less deer-in-the-headlights this time around, and more confident about asking the stupid questions now in order to bring me up to speed faster than silently hoping that I’ll find the needed clue, eventually. It felt like college had pretty much nothing to do with what my first job ended up requiring in the navigation of business speak and process (or really any of the work I actually did, for that matter). Knowing some of the business speak now is certainly useful, but there is so much less artificial process and rule making here, where you have to interface with several other departments to get anything done, who all scrutinize why you need access, redirect you to get someone else’s stamp of approval. Not that good communication and consistency are bad practices, and are indeed what business processes are supposed to enforce, but I get the feeling here that if you have the time and ability to get something done, people here would love that you have volunteered, and let you have at it. It’s refreshing. And I’m enjoying my blissful optimism before I get to digging deep into whatever bad practices or choices that inevitably have been made here just like every other organization.

I thought last year that four tomato plants (five once the volunteer Roma got going) might be too much for the two of us. It’s really hard to have too many roasted tomatoes, though. With two or three more plants, we would probably have needed to start using them in more ways, making our own spaghetti sauce maybe. The two we have now, though nice for garnishing salads and breakfast eggenues (*sigh* I miss Avenue Bread), don’t produce enough to cook with very much.

We picked everything near red to make our first batch of roasted tomatoes, currently in the oven.

Though we do not have blossom end rot, like last year, the tomato plants aren’t looking the greatest. We lost a couple of fruits to cracking and then bugs getting inside.

The yellow summer squash tried to bloom again last week, still with tiny, unhappy leaves. This week, all three squash plants are pretty much dead.