Virtual Halloween Gathering

I took Boom out for a walk and while he paused to do some business, I felt something watching me. I looked over at the flower pots and saw this...


We haven't seen very many pickerel frogs yet this year. I think all the rain we've been getting means they're staying scattered out in the woods. During drought, they all come flocking to the house and our well-watered flower beds, but right now, all of nature is well watered.

I also finally snapped a decent pic of a common whitetail dragonfly:


They flit away as soon as you get within ten feet of them, so unless you have your camera ready to go, you end up with a picture of a rock. :/ This one is a male--the females have white bodies (hence the whitetail name). I have no idea why, but they remind me of WWII fighter planes. XD

We still don't have many butterflies or honeybees, but there have been lots of fireflies this year. So that's something, I guess. But it's weird to go out to my pollinator bed and see NO pollinators. *sigh*

Happy Tuesday, all.

It's here! My new-to-me recumbent exercise bike:

I have christened it Roheryn (disregarding the fact that it's black and probably should be named something Nazgul-ish, but that would hardly be incentive to love riding it).

It was a lovely trip, marred only by a heavy storm on the way home. We had Roheryn covered with two tarps, though, so the electronics stayed dry even if it did get splashed a bit around the bottom where the tarp didn't quite cover. I've ridden it for about ten minutes, as hubby was setting up the Roku on the television, and it rides like a dream. I'm very happy with it and looking forward to using it regularly.

The people we bought it from were lovely, about the same age as hubby and me. He explained how the bike had helped him recover after double hip replacements and consequently given him the cycling bug--he now has four other bicycles, including a recumbent, and had, in fact, finished a 36-mile race that morning. She showed me her charming little garden and sweet old dog while she talked about splitting time between their little Illinois house and a house they own in Mexico. He also showed us his classic Corvette. (To say they were in quite a different income bracket that we are is an understatement! XD But they weren't braggy about it.) They were leaving for France Sunday to watch the mountain stages and then the Paris finale of the Tour. She said she'll be wearing the dotted King of the Mountain jersey while he'll be in a lion costume, so I suppose I'll be scouring the sidelines hoping to spot them! LOL They were the kind of folks you could talk with all day, but we had a long trip back and he was tired from his race, so we loaded up Roheryn and headed home. 

My visit with my sister was fun--she met us at a White Castle that was on our way there. She'll be coming down at the end of the month to see the Fantastic Four movie with us, so lots of visiting time with her this month.

Some pics along the road:

Illinois is very flat and very filled with corn fields:


Once you're out of the St. Louis area, it transitions very quickly to rural farms. There's really not much in the way of suburbs on the east side, probably because East St. Louis is a dying city known mostly for it's decay and high crime. A shame, really, because as you drive past on the Interstate, you can see how glorious the city once was, so much lovely architecture. But most of the buildings are abandoned now, or most of the ones you see from the highway. It always makes me very sad to drive through there.

Dotting all the farm fields are small towns, all with similar main streets:


As a kid, I'd stay with my grandma in southern Illinois, about a hundred miles south of where we were heading that day, but the town she lived near--and where my dad grew up--looked almost identical. I remember walking along and shopping for a new dress every summer at the local dress shop, and then we'd stop at the IGA for groceries and a new comic book. :) This trip for the bike stirred up a lot of good memories! I really like Illinois and its whole vibe. 

Between the corn fields and the small towns are stretches of woods:

I don't know about this stretch, but there was a similar stretch on the way to Grandma's that went through a creek bottom area, and of course it was haunted. *g* A headless horseman, if I recall correctly. We drove through that stretch--called Bogey Creek, between Coulterville and Swanwick--soooo many times, often at night, but I never saw a ghost, headless, horsed, or otherwise.

This week will be much quieter than last week and weekend. Boomer goes to the groomer on Wednesday, and I have an appointment for a breast ultrasound on Thursday, and that's all that's on the calendar. My kind of week!

Happy Monday, all.