Another year older

Ken's another year older today. We went out and did his favorite thing, hunting for photographs. We went to Watkins, since it was a bit cooler today. These little Crescents were everywhere. There were Red-spotted purples, commas and blues sunning in the road but wouldn't cooperate for good pics tho. We then went and had dinner at HyVee, that is what he wanted, their salad bar and I tried their Chinese buffet which was good. He had a box waiting at the door from his daughter, his son sent him a CD and a DVD a couple of days ago. He really liked the funny card my mom sent him, I did too! Funny thing tho, this mornings paper had a birthday cartoon and he was listed in the famous birthday section, (I read the paper first and was able to add them to the paper! I did find it funny that there was a cartoon I could just add Happy Birthday and it looked like it should have been there all along.) I got my book I ordered just last Thurs., today. Nice surprise for me. I love old books and this one was recommended by Cathy Johnson. It was really reasonable too, I love Amazon's used books service! This was printed in 1926, it has by the month what to look for as for wildflowers, birds, butterflies and trees.

We have another swallowtail cat on our dill.
This morning we found this swallowtail on our rhododendron, it was ready to form a chrysalis in the next 12 hrs or so. I checked on it this evening it is gone, some creature had a nice meal!! We used to bring in all our little friends but we thought we let nature do it's thing this year, but it is so hard to do when this happens.
More pics from Watkins, a surprise lily with a little skipper. I surprised a hummingbird when I walked up to take the pics.

Beautiful and graceful, varied and enchanting!

Small but approachable, Butterflies lead you

into the sunny side of life

and everyone deserves a little sunshine :) Jeffrey Glassburg