Yesterday I spent a good part of an hour shutting out a particularly pesky comment spammer. I have very little difficulty with these - the captcha employed in comments seems to be more work than most are willing to put into it, and their softwares don’t really handle it well. I finally succeeded in banning the ip numbers, numbers, since no sooner than I banned one then two or three more comments would come in on a new one. The comments are always added to old posts, never recent, there’s always the URL which is different in each comment and clearly advertising, and the spammer doesn’t enter through the blog itself, instead accessing the comments pages directly.

None of that is new, but the nature of the comments is something of a new gimmick. They almost make sense, and actually conform for the most part to relevance of the post. But they’re all copied and pasted from other websites such as Wikipedia, apparently selected somehow through the use of keywords.

So that was a part of yesterday, and it was not without its entertainments.

Far more entertaining though were yesterday’s hikes. The evil earworm hit me as I photographed this first anole of the year: “He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake...”, and stuck with me for the rest of the day. Now I’m giving it to you. He’s brown of course, and that’s probably a good thing. While there’s a reasonable amount of greenery in the form of Wild Onions, evergreen vines like Carolina Jessamine and Smilax, and patches of early spring ephemerals, it’s still mostly brown. Still it’s reflective of the weather, which has been perverse lately. Nights in the 30s or below, and daytimes breaking the 70s have the anoles out, as well as the frogs.

Here’s a measure of brown, and yet another treefall that I first noticed yesterday. It was just a few days ago that I was looking up at this canted, spindly loblolly pine wondering how long it would manage to stay erect. The storm system that moved through on Tuesday probably did it in. It joins four earlier treefalls visible in the photograph.

The cats are viewing this warm weather as a time to be lazy, spending hours sleeping on the deck in the sun. This comes as a relief to them, for they have spent much time rationalizing cold weather as an excuse to spend hours napping on soft furniture in the comparatively warmer house. But that was yesterday, and today’s today.

The perversity of the weather continues today as a storm system moves through. Yesterday’s blue skies and warmth give way to a day full of rain, which began just an hour ago. We won’t be getting any of that blue snow, though I know someone who will be!