Thursday, September 23, 2010

yellow on yellow

No moths were injured during this photo shoot. No yellow paint was applied. He came that way. Really! Think about it like this: if you were this colour and saw a house this colour, wouldn't you set up residence there? It would be a serendipitous sign I don't know that I could resist. A 'message from God'. . . .

OK. Look. If I had painted this guy, would I have been able to get him the same colour all the way around? Including getting him to hold still long enough to daube on the camouflage spots and get full coverage around the legs and antennae? He'd be a dead bug by then, and this guy is clearly not. See? That's a vertical wall he's clinging to, not a horizontal surface.

Now what sort of bug he is, is anybody's guess. I'm just glad he moved in. Glad, so long as he stays outside! No moths allowed in, to ravage wool socks and sweaters. And that is final. I don't care what colour you are.

Speaking of colour, that's really more of a saffron now, wouldn't you say? Yellow is so generic. . . .

P.S. - thanks to alert reader Tiffany, we now know this is a Crocus Geometer. Thanks to the MagickCanoe, we learn that there are Crocus Geometers and FALSE Crocus Geometers. Who knew?!

Saturday, September 18, 2010

night sky

There is the unmistakable hint of fall in the air. At the same time, a very late firefly has been lighting up in the pasture the last two evenings. I love this time of year.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

the melon

You will have noted the use of the singular.

There was one. It was smaller than it appears in this picture. I say this in the interest of full disclosure, but I do not care to give you a picture proving the fact.

I left it on the vine a good long time, hoping it would get bigger. It did not. I finally harvested it when I could smell it when I strolled past. It was starting to attract the attention of small, boring insects as well, who had just started an attack on the dirt-side of the rind. . . . No matter, though; they didn't get far.

The melon was good, if a bit over-ripe already. And small. I know I mentioned small.

Oh well! I've saved the seeds and will try again next year. I think I'll put them over where the cucumbers grew so extravagantly this year!

[sigh. . . .] I had such high hopes when I first wrote about the melons [heh! melons. . . .] back in May. . . .