Beetle's Adventure

I was rocking out on my guitar when I saw a large black beetle scurry past. She hit the wall and tried to climb up it. When that didn't work she stopped and pondered her situation. A nearby cellar spider made a move toward her then stopped, realizing the beetle was about five times larger, and probably weighed about fifty times more. The cellar spider froze and tried to pretend like it didn't exist. Considering they look like a speck of lint, it wasn't too hard.

Luckily for the spider, the beetle decided to take action and began running the other way, where the darkness of the file cabinet proved seductive. She ran through the web of a cobweb spider. The cobweb spider didn't even bother. She disappeared into the darkness.

We'd had a lot of rain lately, and the big-headed subterranean beetle is, despite its name, a subterranean animal. No doubt, it had been washed into the basement by the minor flooding we've been experiencing. I decided to take action.

By the time I got my camera, I figured I probably wouldn't find her again. I found her four seconds later, just on the other side of the file cabinet, half-concealed under the hose extension of my Shop Vac. I scooted her out, and she proceeded to hightail as fast as she freaking could across my basement. Fortunately for me, big-headed ground beetles are more burrowers then runners. I was able to capture several photos as she desperately tried to escape what she was certain was her doom.

Ant Battle Royale

An epic battle took place in my backyard, only on a very very tiny scale. Two ant colonies fought it out in the fight to the death over control of resources. I don't really know where their colonies even are, but the corpses of many a slain ant were littered all over the sidewalk, and several others were in the midst of fighting:

Pain Journals, Part 3

I am at the end of two weeks of working from home, and using speech recognition software to try to help heal my hands. I'm happy to report that the pain finally seems to be subsiding. So, at this point it seems most likely that my problem was tendinitis all along. That's good news, because it means that it won't be something I have to deal with forever. I will probably have to take it a lot easier on the computer from now on, if I want to keep doing things like woodworking. It means I'll have to strengthen up my hands and do things and shorter bursts and try to keep my stress level down, as I tend the clench up when I'm stressed or upset. Overall, I believe this is good news and I'm hopeful that with a little bit more careful work I can get the pain down to zero.

Pain Journals, Part 2

After attempting to treat my hands as though my issue or carpal tunnel syndrome, I started to think that my problem might be something else. I have taken to laying off the computer as much as possible, and that has helped some of my secondary problems such as elbow pain and thumb tendon pain. However, the main pain is in my finger joints and it occurs every morning or if my hands are immobile for too long. According to the research I've done, the only ailment that really fits that description is arthritis. My doctor mentioned that as a possibility, but his opinion was that there wasn't much I could do about it anyway. He said, "It wouldn't change my treatment recommendation," which was, and this is an exact quote, to "suck it up."

I don't know if that really is the only possibility, or not. Maybe I need a new doctor.

Cecropia Update

This is a mini preview update of what is to come. As some of you may remember, I put my cecropia moths into cold storage (the refrigerator) toward the end of July last year. I remove them when the weather began to warm up at the end of April, and they haven't budged since then. I've read the attrition rate for cecropia moths can be something like 50% or more, so when the two week mark came and went I assumed that the odds were simply against me and none of them were going to wake up from diapause, the state of cessation of almost all function they enter during the winter.

At that point, I decided I wanted to cocoons and see one for myself. I've seen pictures of them on the Internet, and wanted to see one of my own eyes. So I gave it a shot and open one up. Just at the moment when I exposed the pupa enough that I could see the large antenna swooping down across the body, which is the indicator of a male cecropia, the pupa began to jitter and it rolled over in the cocoon.

HE IS ALIVE!

Needless to say, this is very exciting. When I woke up this morning, I could additionally hear one of the other mods moving around in his cocoon. So I am fairly certain that I have at least two moths that will be eclosing in the next week or so (hopefully).



Here is the same photo enlarged slightly. The cocoon is actually slightly more open than pictured, but I am afraid of disturbing it now that I know it's alive.