Sting

Another lovely day down at the Southern Tip. I moved some braai wood this morning to find this feisty little fellow:

I’ll update the image when I upload it to Flickr. [Note to self – update the image when you upload it to Flickr.] Yeah, yeah – I did this. [really cool Flickr link]

It’s a Opistophthalmus capensis. But of course you knew that already. Nasty, painful sting, (which he was more than ready to use) but not medically important.

So I was fairly safe while talking my photo.

Footnote: We also found a Parabuthus capensis the night before. [phone pic]

(I was a bit more careful with that one.)

Straightforward

I’ve long lamented the standard of customer service in Cape Town. And with good reason: it’s generally dreadful. But then, to be fair, when it hasn’t been dreadful, I have also passed comment and told you that it hasn’t been dreadful. More than once, too.

My laptop arrived yesterday. And it was exactly the laptop that I had ordered and it arrived pretty much exactly when they said it would. To some people, that might not be seen as good service, but if you’re coming from such a low baseline (as we are), then it’s actually pretty awesome.

[champagne corks pop in background]

Further good news was that it took a very limited amount of setting up, and that process went very smoothly too. All of which mean that I was able to play with some photos from the weekend.

This one is a Parabuthus capensis scorpion which the kids were illuminating under UV torchlight. (Scorpions glow under UV light because of chemicals called tetrahydro-betacarbolines in their exoskeletons, by the way).

Editing photos in LightRoom on the new RAMy laptop was a whole different experience. I think it’s going to be a much more pleasant “task” in future. Which can only mean more photos for you guys.

Speaking of which – here are the ones I did last night.