Summer Vacation 2013: Bugs and more bugs!

On this trip, we met our first fireflies!

 And we found a dead cicada.  It was huge!  (Yes, we still have it.  Shudder.)

We also met a number of caterpillars.  Here is one.

Summer Vacation 2013: Fun with the Very Still (and more bugs!)

We drove by this cemetery on our last trip, and Lil' Gal remembered that she wanted to go.  Begged us to go.  "Can we, please?  Please?  I've never been to a cemetery."  (True.  Darn that sea-level logistical thing.) So we went.  It was a lovely place.

OK, now stand together and smile...  Oh.

We have to go up here!

 Let's try this again.  Please stand here and...  Oh.

 Who is lecturing who here?

 Anyone home?

 OK, that is a great smile.  Now, if we could just get your sister to...  Oh.

 Um.  I am not appropriate.

 Where is Lil' Gal?

 Peek a boo!

Later, we met a lovely beetle.

And some very lovely slugs.  Or so they tell me.  Shudder...

...who left some not-so-lovely slime on the kids' hands that wouldn't wash off.  Not with soap, not with scrubbing.  Thank goodness for Google and lots of table salt.

Summer Vacation 2013: Philly Feeding Frenzy

(Yes, we made it back from vacation.  Seems I had a few photos to go through.  Ahem.)

One of our first adventures was feeding some friendly horses -- and a cute little pony.  The very cute donkeys would not come over, but we had plenty of fun without them.

Then we fed some ducks, who were quite happy about that.

This tree also seemed hungry, but we had no idea what to feed him.

We found our first of many cicada shells, which totally creeped Lil' Guy out.  But not for long.  Stay tuned on the bug front.

Finally, it was time to feed US!  It has been decades since I've had a Friendly's sundae.  NOM.

6/28 - Alien Gremlin wonders about Wonder Ice Cream

Wonder Bread does not have much wonder in it, but we'd hold ice cream to higher standards, right?

Gremlin Alien also enjoyed a free lunch (thanks, Raj!)...

... and did *not* enjoy the free cockroach twice his size (thanks, BART!).

The twins wondered what kind of spider this was at Mama's, so we looked it up in our book.  It was a black widow!!

6/09 - Derby Tournament and THE MANTIDS HATCHED!

I was off on Friday for a school meeting and to get ready for my team's participation in the Attack of the C Squads tournament.  Here are Disco Brawl and Beryl Belligerent, enjoying some cherry pie with 6 of our fans.

We didn't win any of our bouts (sigh), but we played our hearts out, despite a bunch of incidents that day and the prior week that could easily have kept us home.  Go, TVRG!

Oh, and I jammed!!

And when I got home?  One of the new hermit crabs had escaped *and* the praying mantis egg case had hatched!  O.M.G.

What a weekend!

10/08 - Yellow Jack exceeds the time limit

He liked finding yellow things on the way in to work, especially this yellow parking meter.

I wish there were a time limit on my morning meetings.  4 hours straight seems a bit excessive when one’s sick...

Yellow Jack thought my lentil soup was a murky swimming pool and was going to use the spoon as a catapult to sproing in there for a dip until I yelled, “Stop!” (My coworkers wondered why I was yelling at the soup.)

Going after this cold with both barrels (they call it Tom YUM for a reason):

Odd bug behavior edition:  I noticed there was a grasshopper in the house.  Of all the places to go, s/he made a beeline for the Halloween spider/spiderweb decorations on the fireplace.  Of course.  S/he seemed to take a special interest in walking on the rubber spiders, through the web (I got queasy at the thought of having to untangle one of those spindly legs), and finally landed like a bow on the big spider's head.  So pretty.  Here s/he is, being the spider's parrot?  Yarrrchirp.

9/14 - Fly Guy and the Daisy Susans

We couldn’t decide if this plant was some kind of daisy or a brown-eyed susan, so we just called her Daisy Susan.   She didn’t seem to mind.

San Francisco is famous for its crooked street, but did you know it has some small crooked buildings as well?  (Let’s not get started on all the crooked and bent people that live here.  That is not a topic for children.)