Stick insect!

Posted on by Ian C.

At school (many) years ago, we had stick insects – I kept some of my own in a tall plastic jar, feeding them with privet hedge branches and watching them grow, lay eggs (which hatched into tiny versions of their parents); all fascinating stuff but I’m astonished to discover that there’s one of these exotic creatures right here in our garden!

It wasn’t keen on me getting close with the camera, and proved itself alive by moving and turning away a bit, though it didn’t move in the slow wobbling wiggly way that I remember from school days …

SONY DSC
SONY DSC

Sorry to anyone that’s not keen on insects, but I always found these fascinating when I was young!

Welcome (back) to MINI

Posted on by Ian C.

Surprisingly, I discovered this weekend that MINI USA still send out welcome kits, quite differently packaged to what I’ve received previously; the interesting package design is intended to be re-usable, with instructions to turn it inside out and use it as a bag:

SONY DSC
SONY DSC
SONY DSC
SONY DSC

Contents include the usual MINI pen and notebook, also a quite nice MINI flash drive and of course a copy of MINI International; also included are “adverts” for MINI insurance, MINI Performance Motoring School, MINI Financial (but I’ve already bought the car so can’t understand this one!), a Name Your MINI sticker, a quite fun 101 Fundamentals of Good Motoring booklet, and of course the Welcome Letter (sadly no longer from Jim McDowell).

Nice job, MINI USA – a good reminder of why I’m driving a MINI again.

Distant Summer Lightning

Posted on by Ian C.

We knew that our new home was nicely located with a view over the wetlands, but we didn’t realize just how good our weather view would be – it turns out that living in (flat) Florida with the nearest trees a few hundred yards away gives us great views of both sunsets (examples: June, February) as well as the regular summer thunder and lightning – but it’s much harder to record lightning than sunsets!

Last night was spectacular; a storm maybe 20 miles west of us struck lightning both cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground for at least an hour; we were too far to hear thunder except occasional deep rumbles, but we had a great view of lightning. This 1/2 minute clip is extracted from only 3 minutes of video I recorded:

Head to YouTube to watch in higher (full screen) resolution.