Late Summer Discoveries

Buckaroo and I were digging around for blueberries near the lake yesterday-- It's starting to feel like an Easter egg hunt by the beach where they're all picked over-- and we found a bird's nest. At least I think it belongs to a bird, but it was on the ground. If you click the picture you might be able to see the blue ribbon in there. It might be dental floss.



It must be caterpillar season because the guys are everywhere, and I haven't seen any that look like the fuzzy guys in California. In Auburn we had little black pillars with an orange or yellow stripe. This guy was hanging out in my garden, and I tried to Google him, but I couldn't come up with much, other than his being a fuzzy goldy, which I could have guessed by looking at him.


Oh, but there is a really cool web site called What's That Bug? Where people post pictures of creepy crawlers, and the good people there try to identify them.

This silky white guy is another one I found hanging out in my mint. He's going to be a moth when he grows up. I didn't take this photo, unfortunately.

I think I mentioned that the Daddy Long Legs out here are black with an orange-ish body. I tried to get a photo of this one-- on the left-- I don't know if you can see him because he blends in so well with the pine needles.

These are some very dainty (and blurry) flowers growing by the water. They have tall stems. They might be weeds, actually, but they're so delicate and sweet.

This fellow is just the opposite of delicate and sweet, rather ornery I hear. When I first saw one on the blueberry bushes, I said to R, "Look at this cool beetle. His shell is like copper." Then R told me that it was a Japanese beetle, and they eat everything.

According to Wiki they eat 300 different kinds of plants, and they have no predator in the U.S. Bummer. So I guess I won't be making friends. I read that a gardener could try spraying them with a 50/50 mixture of soap and water because it dries up their bodies. Yik.

Otherwise, you know that papercut art (like the cut-out snowflakes that kids make in grammar school)-- well, that's how all the leaves look when the beetles are done with them. Very intricate work.

Well, in case you were on tenterhooks about it, R's interview was just ok. They don't want to pay him quite as much as he'd hoped, and they want him to spend the first two months working in Boston. Too far! The interview was three hours long with all sorts of different people. Very stressful, and he won't find out if they liked him until tomorrow.

So in honor of R, and because tomorrow is our anniversary, I'm ending with an R quote from earlier this week that made me giggle and giggle:

"You're the luckiest wife I've ever had."