My very good friend Mr. Aaron Dude was married in Tampa last weekend. It was such a blessing to be part of this celebration of Aaron and Sherry joining their lives together. For more pictures (by a professional) click here to go to Mr. Billy's blog.
This is Middle Prong River located in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Being very lush and green, it reminds me of Middle Earth and I half expected to see Gollum jump out from behind a rock.
I found this critter crawing around a building here in Oak Ridge. It turns out to be a saddleback caterpillar, which can leave a nasty sting.
From the USGS site:
Another unique slug caterpillar. Charcoal black or brown, with unmistakable lime green abdominal saddle. Saddle with central brown patch ringed with white. Dorsum of first and eighth abdominal segments with fingerlike lobes bearing numerous stinging spines. Sting intense and of considerable duration. Food: broadly polyphagous on trees, shrubs, grasses such as corn, and other garden plants.
Some major hail fell from the sky last Sunday during a severe storm. I've never hail this big. Hail is formed when liquid water gets caught up in big updrafts and freezes. Sometimes this happens several times as you can see from the rings above when I cut some of the hail stones in half.
These interesting ice blobs remind me of stalagtites growing down from a icy roof - exept they get bigger. I noticed them recently while hiking up in the Smoky Mountains. The little blobs are only a couple of inches high and are actually in a moving stream.
