A menagerie of miracles

From the archives of “Well duh!” – I realized last night that after I write an emotionally draining piece (as I did on Monday), I’m — imagine this — emotionally drained the next day!!!  Shocker.  Which explains my absence yesterday.  I’m back today with a whole little menagerie of miracles.

#1 – I sat in the car for about 25 minutes earlier today while talking on the phone and I watched a spider build a web between my car window and mirror.  It was astonishing to see!  I’ve always wondered how spiders do it..imagining them swinging wildly from one point to another, jumping off and hoping they make contact with the place they wanted on the other side.  I imagine the opening steps to be extremely haphazard.  In fact, it was astoundingly methodical.  I didn’t have my camera with me, so I found a video on YouTube that’s a lot like what I saw – SO cool!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCi5ikoDVko

#2 – When I was in the parking lot at WalMart, I walked past a car that had about 30 or 40 pennies strewn under the passenger’s side of the car.  One in particular caught my eye – a bright shiny one that was calling to me.  As I bent to pick it up, I noticed that well over half of the other pennies were heads-down.  I figured it would be a long few days for those pennies before someone picked them up.  So I turned all of the ones I could reach to heads-up.  I like the thought that someone else will feel lucky because I took a moment to turn a penny over.  Such a small little thing.

#3 – While I was in WalMart, I dropped off some pictures to be developed.  I’m trying out a new digital camera and this was a big test – does it take pictures that make decent prints? (For the record, I’m replacing a 2 megapixel camera from the dark ages of digital photography, so just about ANY camera would be a significant improvement!)  I processed the prints at the 1-hour machine and then went off to poke around the store.  I wandered back to the photography area again about 25 minutes later to look at rechargeable batteries and the woman behind the counter came walking over to me with an envelop in her hand and said, “Did I guess right?”  She held it up and there were my prints!  She had recognized me from one of the pictures!  What a lovely thing for her to do – and a full 35 minutes before they were “supposed” to be ready.