Customer Delight

Was having a look around the terrace garden with the new additions. As usual the tussle between flowering plants and vegetables goes on, with wifey giving more importance to flowers.

I noticed that now she is slowly capturing the walls too.

Not that I have any objections there, but the hard work falls on me, spending a nice Sunday morning drilling holes on those stubborn walls to hang some silly looking things. For me they look like some letter boxes but wifey insists that they are meant to hang flowers. 

I show her around and tell her about the pesticide free green tomatoes and the colourful capsicum that we can have.

“just imagine, we can pluck the ridge gourd  when these creepers grow ”

“and look at these newly planted ones, on the left is the chilly, the middle one is carrot and the extreme right ones are onions. Can you imagine the money we can save on onions.”

Wifey “you always think about saving money. Think about it this way, how beautiful it will look when we will be surrounded by these wonderful red flowers and buds that are growing on the fence”

I thought this was getting us nowhere so we decided to have an equal amount of greenery for both vegetables and flowers.

The next day morning as usual I went to the terrace to pluck a fresh leaf from the Tulsi plant which I use in the morning brew of tea.

As I looked up I saw this perfect web against the morning sunlight.

I was curious about the perfect geometry and the intricate pattern that a spider could create.  Once my tea was ready, I pulled up a chair and sat down and had a close look at this fabulous creation.  
To get some more good shots of the net I rigged up some of the dark clothes on the clothesline as the background.

Those lines looked so parallel and I was wondering how did this guy manage to get those lines so parallel row after row.

 In that perfect circle of web why was a part of it left undone?

Notice those four arcs on the periphery? The complete web is built on those arcs.

It seems the spider uses their body length to measure the distance between two weaves (that explains the parallel lines)

There are different kinds of webs and this is the orb web.

After observing carefully I found the reason for that open end. Our guy (the spider) used that open space to run down the line and capture the prey once it is caught in the net.

He was hiding on a leaf covered by a canopy of his own web woven around the leaf. After all he has to protect himself against other predators like small birds.

Spiders do not usually adhere to their own webs because they are able to spin both sticky and non sticky silk (thread) They are careful to travel on the non sticky portion of the web to catch the prey.   

I found some twists in the net at some places. Does this have any engineering significance?

As this was very delicate, the web kept fluttering in the breeze. I could not do anything about that shake, but to reduce my hand shake, I mounted the camera on a tripod and clicked using the timer.  

I clicked these pics of the web on two different days. (that explains the different backgrounds)

Just imagine, we just brush off a spider web thinking it as a nuisance, but the poor guy painstakingly builds another one by next morning.

Coming back to the garden, we fixed these solar lamps in the pot.

They get charged by the day, and as soon as its dusk they turn on and give a nice glow in the night.

The complete assembly is made of plastic and it was a good buy at $2 per piece.

Talking of good buy, we bought these book shelves at $ 19 per shelf. I don’t think we could get one made in India at this cost with pure wood.

They came in a packed box with simple instructions for mounting it. Not that one needs any instruction, as you just fix the two screws (that was provided) and hang it. But what I found useful was the strip of paper that came along with it with markings of the center distance of the screw holes. You just use it as a template to drill the holes.

But more than that what I found very useful was the spirit level (bubble level) that was stuck at the center of it.

Did I ask for it? No.

Was I expecting it in the pack? No.

But it was still there. This is a perfect example of what is known in business parlance as  “customer delight”