A Charming Spider Makes a Web on Our Front Porch

I always take the cat out onto the front porch for a few minutes each morning. We sit in a chair and listen to the birds. Those are priceless moments, so peaceful and calm, with my fuzzy boy in my arms in the morning light. We watch the day begin.

There are two chairs on the front porch, and on this morning, one of them was occupied. A small spider was in the midst of making a beautiful horizontal web, and I ran for my camera. Getting the shot was harder than you might think; the angle was critical.

Above is the best of the lot, and I really did take a LOT!! Probably two dozen photos to get this one. There's the spider - and you can almost see its eyes, I think. The pink in the background is one of our last rhododendron blooms. I amped up the saturation a bit to make it really shine.

It was a day that also featured two firsts. One was that I went for my first swim of the year, at Bald Eagle State Park. It was sunny and breezy; quite comfortable, actually; a quintessential summer day, from childhood. We swam and then we headed over to the old dock area, where there was quite a cloud show going on. You may see my best cloud photo in monochrome in the extras.

The other first was that this day was the first time we ate out again INSIDE an actual restaurant since the COVID virus quarantine began. Our county "went green" at the very end of May, and so some restrictions were eased up.

Some restaurants (but not all!) that previously only did take-out are now open for sit-down meals. So my husband, in his birthday week, insisted that we go to Jim's in Bellefonte for a wonderful lunch of chef salads and golden, crispy cottage fries (we skipped the garllic bread this time). And so we did. Oh, NOM!

My soundtrack song for this day is for my spidey friend above, whose work I admire. Yes, it's still there, building a new web this morning, and we will leave it alone, for we LOVE spiders. Especially itty bitty adorable ones, like this one. So we need a song about a front porch, and here's a country tune I like: Lonestar, with My Front Porch Looking In.