Quick Takes Friday

--1--

I'm hosting a Mr. Linky thingy next month, and I would like the word to go out, so I'm using slot #1 to point to the November 1 Meet 'n' Greet with the Saints. Please check it out!

--2--

The tea olives are blooming outside my front door. They smell heavenly. I think we need another dozen of these.

--3--

Here's another one for the "Kids Say" file:

Four-year-old: Do you remember last night when I held your ice cream cone while you opened Jude's popsicle?
Me: Sort of...
Four-year-old: I don't.

--4--

Look at what we found last week on our nature walk! You can't tell from the picture but it's a good four inches long. The kids were fascinated.


At first we thought it was a luna moth caterpillar. We see about one luna moth a year around our house, and this guy looked similar to pictures we remembered of the caterpillar. They don't have the little spiky things though. Then we thought, maybe a hickory horned devil--we've got a lot of hickories around here--but no, that kind of caterpillar was a little too fierce-looking. Finally we saw some Google images that looked just like our guy. He's an imperial moth caterpillar, which is related to the luna moth. This caterpillar was right in the middle of our nature path, so stationary that we thought something was wrong with it, but it started to move around well enough when we tried to take pictures and draw it in our nature journals. Luke found him right after a hawk flew over us--I think it fell out of a tree in some sort of evasive behavior, which is ironic because it made him easy pickings for us. We put him next to a tree under a leaf and moved on.

--5--

I've been trying to use more of my bookmarked recipes, so I made a Cobb salad earlier this week for lunch. So easy. So good.

--6--

I have some questions about links. I'm pretty liberal with links when I post, because I love them when I'm reading blogs. Well, I stumbled on something that seemed to take for granted that when you link to something someone wrote, particularly a blog, the polite thing to do is give them a heads up that that's what you're doing. I could very well be wrong, but I don't think I've ever done that.

What's the ettiquette? When you link to another blog or website, is it considered courteous to let them know? Or is it unnecessary? If you sometimes do and sometimes don't, how do you determine whether or not to? How do you prefer to do it--a comment, an e-mail, a trackback?

--7--

On the other end, let's talk about comments. When you leave a comment, do you check back to see if anyone responds? I'm curious. I know that some websites and bigger blogs will get a whole discussion going just based on what's in the comment box. That's not what I'm talking about. I've seen some sites where people drop a comment and leave, and that seems to be it. In some instances, you might see one commenter respond to another, or the author respond to one comment in particular. I've seen a few blogs in which the blog author seems to take care to respond to as much commentary activity as she can. As a blogger and a commenter, what's your typical practice?


And what are your Quick Takes?