Good Housekeeping "Seal of Dis-Approval"...

Earlier in the summer I noticed that the spiders like to build nests in the opening of the deck rail.  I guess the design affords them great opportunity to catch food with all of it's rectangular openings.  There is a bit of a view at the place, and so the quandary was to design a deck rail that would meet building code, go with the style of the house, and yet not block the view or "stop your eye".

Wandering around the local farm store one day on an unrelated quest solved the problem... there in the storage yard with all the cool tractor implements, watering troughs, and things of the like was a heavy galvanized wire horse fence material.  Cut to size, dip in a bath of black Rustolem in a quickly made vat of two by fours and visqueen, and the deck rail panels are hardly noticeable to the eye, unless those eyes are attached to a spider.

The same "eye stop" thing is true of the spiders constructions really.  You can hardly notice them under normal circumstances.  This summer I tried to photograph some of them, but my self-imposed rule for this blog of using only a pocket camera and not the digital SLR meant that I didn't get a good picture.  I took out a plant sprayer with some water in it, and I was able to capture some of the design by misting the web, but I was not satisfied with the pictures, so I didn't publish them.

Well once again I am reminded of how useful a tool procrastination can be if you learn to harness it.  Maybe I'll get to that.  At any rate, nature decided that I should record the wonder of the web, so it piled on a little help the other morning to highlight the various designs. I call this one waterfall and it was still hard to photograph.

It was hard to photograph until my handy photographic assistant came and used a passive reflector (her body) to backlight the scene.

Once properly lit, we could get a nice head on shot:

Webs are everywhere.  Click on the picture to get the bigger version and look at the one in the center, right as the deck rail turns.  Quite a design.

By this point, the photographic assistant and her sister had better things to do involving the search for things to catch (there is always something to catch on farm ground) so I was on my own;

Well, my mind wasn't quite in the gutter on this shot, but it was close:

On a lighter note

I think it is time for me to play tutor for the college kid... he has some study questions he wants to drill on for his final.  That will help me keep the cobwebs out of my mind.