Dragonflies frequent the plants in my backyard. The little guys come in so many colors. I’ve seen tan, red, purple (like this one), bright blue, bright green, and black. This little guy was resting on top of a plant stake and he let me get close enough to take one macro shot before he flew away.

I realized tonight that I’ve only made three short posts in the past three weeks that AREN’T about my miscarriage. Part of me is tired of thinking about it, and I am sure that my readers, all two of you, are tired of reading about it too, so I’m going to try to move on to other topics now for the most part. I can’t promise there won’t be the occasional “woe is me” post, but I am trying not to let the woe engulf me and writing about normal things will be an exercise in getting my head out of that sadness.

So. Onward!

Last.fm
Doc turned me on to this cool site called Last.fm. It’s a free service (similar to Pandora) that keeps track of what music you listen to, streams music that it thinks you’ll like on your own personal “radio stations” (and does a darn good job, by the way, of choosing music that I like), connects you with people that have similar tastes, and introduces you to independent artists and music you may not have heard before.

Try it! It’s very easy to install and operate. It imports your iTunes listening history and then is able to custom-tailor “radio stations” for you.

The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You
I absolutely love Cracked.com’s lists. The people who write them are hilariously witty and razor sharp. Even if I don’t have any interest in the topic, although I usually do, I still read them for the quality of writing. Here are just a few choice quotes from a recent article about six adorably cute animals that can fucking kill you. This shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

If animals could talk, they would spend most of their time calling us dicks and telling us to get off their land. The traits we think of as “cute” are often simply tricks animals have developed to get tourists to throw them food.

There is no way you could look at a big, fat, happy, squishy, huggable hippo and not think, “If she could talk like a human, she would sound just like Jada Pinkett Smith and be oh so sassy.” You would totally name her Sassybaskets and she would be your tutu-wearing, ballet-dancing, strut-walking pal for life. Just you and Sassybaskets against the world! Look out, New York, here comes Sassybaskets!

The platypus is mother nature’s way of saying, “I made this thing out of spare parts I found on the workshop floor, and it can still fucking cripple you.”

It turns out swans are now and have always been vicious, mean little motherfuckers who will not hesitate to snap your fingers off one by one for daring to pollute its presence. And then going off to laugh with all their friends about what a huge loser you are.

Orange Almond Cake with Caramel Sauce
A few weeks ago I made a delicious cake. It is in no way low-calorie or low-fat, and it tastes utterly decadent. Here’s the recipe:

3/4 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs plus 1 egg yolk
1/3 cup orange marmalade
1/3 cup light sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1-3/4 cup flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
7 ounces almond paste, crumbled

Sauce:
1/4 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon rum extract
1/3 cup orange marmalade

Preheat oven to 350.

Lightly butter a 9″-round bundt cake pan; set aside.

With a mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 3-4 minutes. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the apricot preserves, sour cream, and vanilla extract; beat for 1 minute more.

Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt; lightly fold into the batter along with the almond paste.

Spread batter evenly into the prepared pan . Bake for 40-45 minutes or until the center of the cake is firm when the pan is lightly tapped.

For sauce:
In a medium saucepan, melt butter. Stir in brown sugar and cook for 2 minutes. Stir in remaining ingredients and simmer over low heat for a few minutes more. Drizzle over cake slices.

Recent Activities
Last Friday night we went to an art show and dinner with Kathryn and Brett. Even though I didn’t particularly care for most of the art (a student show, watercolors), it was nice to get out and do something cultural with friends. I don’t know why we don’t do that more often. Recent events have got me thinking a lot about priorities and free-time activities, and I’ve realized that I miss actively making art and actively going out to look at other peoples’ art. I want to start doing that more often. We need to force ourselves to find the time…. maybe by just writing on the calendar what we are going to do, and then sticking to it. For someone who’s supposed to be an artist, I sure avoid art a lot of the time. I don’t understand myself sometimes.

I thought I was afraid of bees and wasps BEFORE I read this. Did you know that the Japanese hornet can reach up to 3 inches in length and can fly 50 miles a day? Did you know that 30 of them can decimate a colony of 30,000 honeybees in just a couple of hours (”In three hours, there are piles of limbs and heads and just fucking bits of things that could possibly have been alive at one point, and the hornets have stormed the hive and flown away with all the bees’ children. Who will then be eaten.”)? I swear I’m going to have nightmares.

From the article “The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World:”

It’s the size of your thumb and it can spray flesh-melting poison. We really wish we were making that up for, you know, dramatic effect because goddamn, what a terrible thing a three-inch acid-shooting hornet would be, you know? Oh, hey, did we mention it shoots it into your eyes? Or that the poison also has a pheromone cocktail in it that’ll call every hornet in the hive to come over and sting you until you are no longer alive?

Think you can outrun it? It can fly 50 miles in a day. It’d be nice to say something reassuring at this point, like “Don’t worry, they only live on top of really tall mountains where nobody wants to live,” but no, they live all over the goddamned place, including outside Tokyo.

Forty people die like that every year, each of them horribly.

The article features more horrifying stories about insects, including army ants (”There are reports of animals the size of horses being overwhelmed and shredded by them. Go stand next to a horse and then think about what that means for you.”), botflies, bullet ants, and Africanized honeybees.

Cephalopods can be masters of disguise, and this video is proof. The whole video is fascinating but just wait till you see the octopus at about 4:15 into the movie. You’ll find yourself rewinding and watching it over and over.

On a related note, I am digging this “TED: Ideas Worth Spreading” website. They tout themselves as providing “Inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers,” and that’s exactly what it seems to be: a collection of talks and lectures on interesting subjects by interesting people. I think that TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design.

Saturday evening, Doc made me laugh so hard I literally fell out of my chair! I was doing some work on my computer and listening to Genesis’ Fly on the Windshield, and he waltzed into my office and began performing interpretive dance to the song. At the very end, when he mimicked the fly stuck on the windshield, wide-eyed and one wing flapping in the wind, I completely lost it and doubled over laughing, lost my balance, and slid to the floor in hysterics.

I love just laughing like that. He makes me laugh all the time. It’s great.

Speaking of things on the windshield, this morning while driving down Skillman at 45 miles per hour, a little gecko appeared on my windscreen, fully alive and clinging on for dear life. I don’t know if he’d been sleeping in the windshield-wiper area (which is full of leaves, as we park the car under a tree), or if he dropped from a passing tree and just happened to land on my windscreen, but in any case he looked terrified—to the extent that geckos can—and every few seconds, buffeted by the wind, he slid another inch or two up the windscreen. I was in heavy traffic and couldn’t immediately stop, but kept saying “Just hang on a few more seconds, little dude!” I pulled into the first parking lot I could find in hopes that he was still attached to the car, but alas, he was gone. Poor little guy. Hopefully he flew off and landed lightly on the pavement, and was able to scramble off the road before being smooshed. I’m telling myself that’s what happened, and that he’ll go on to lead a long and fruitful life, making many baby geckos to help control the mosquito population.

I’ve been thinking a lot in recent years about off-the-grid living. I think it would be really hard, and really interesting, and I’d probably eventually return to The Grid but have the knowledge to make a lot of changes and seriously reduce my “footprint.”

I just read about a family living in an apartment in New York City who are entirely off the grid. No electricity in the apartment, no carbon-consuming personal or public transport, no commercial cleaning products,  no shampoo, no packaging on any products purchased, no toilet paper.

That’s right, no toilet paper.

I could give up (and have given up) a lot of  things, but toilet paper is not one of them. Of all the modern conveniences we enjoy in 21st century America, this is right up at the top of my list. I recycle absolutely everything that’s possible to recycle, I don’t run the water when brushing my teeth, I don’t use disposable feminine hygiene products, I only run full loads in the dishwasher and clothes washer, I compost my food scraps, I don’t put chemicals on my yard, I drive a hybrid car, I open the windows instead of using the air conditioner when it’s cool enough (hard to do in Texas, but I try). 

So I’m not giving up toilet paper. Call me extravagant and wasteful if you will, but I think that the karma I gain from the abovementioned lifestyle practices is more than enough to make up for it.

One thing that I am interested in doing is substituting environmentally harmless substances for the cleaning products I currently buy. We have 409 spray, bathroom cleaner, Windex, carpet foam, etc, and I would like to start using home-crafted formulas using ingredients like lemon juice, vinegar, baking soda, borax, and bleach (although I’m not sure about bleach… must do more research).

Ideally I’d love to live in an underground house made largely of natural and recycled materials (cool in summer, warm in winter, without an air conditioner) with a huge vegetable garden, sunlight reflecting tubes, an outdoor shower, giant arrays of solar panels, and use a stationary bike to help charge up batteries.

So here’s the deal: I hate cucumbers. Hate them like no other food on earth. Given the choice of starving to death or eating a cucumber, starving might win.

However, I looooove pickles and I want to make my own. So I planted cucumber seeds this spring. My plant has so far produced exactly ONE cucumber, and this is it. It’s about two inches in diameter, and one end has turned orange and swelled to enormous proportions.

Now I don’t claim to know everything about how plants work, but I’m pretty sure cucumbers are not supposed to mutate like this while growing. Needless to say, I will not be pickling and eating this little alien fruit.

Oh, by the way, this is part of my Modified Project 365. For the next six weeks or so I’ll be taking photos and uploading as I have the time and energy. Hopefully around mid-September I’ll be able to return to doing this daily.

My friend Stacey lives in Minneapolis and luckily was not on the bridge over the river at the time of its collapse.

Which reminded me of the footage I’ve seen of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (also known, ominously, considering its fate, as “Galloping Gertie”) tearing itself to pieces in a high wind in 1940.

Any ideas what this is? It came from a tree, and it’s about 3/4″ in diameter.

I love all the rain we’ve been having lately. I think it’s precipitated to some degree almost every single day for the past month, which is unheard of in Texas, especially considering that for the past several years we’ve been living under drought conditions. The rain has also kept the temperatures down; normally it’s in the upper 90s by now, but we’ve been holding in the mid to upper 80s. Steamy, but a little cooler than usual.

However, you know who else also loves all this rain? Mosquitos. I have never experienced mosquito infestations like we have right now. I can’t even go out to get the mail without being eaten alive.

I mentioned some time last month that I went jogging one morning and was attacked and followed by a cloud of mosquitos. This happened to me again yesterday evening as Doc and I went for a walk. Eventually I just strolled boldly down the middle of streets instead of on the sidewalks, to be as far away from grass as possible.

Doc said that every time we passed near an area where they were hanging out, he could see them approach the backs of my legs, flying in formation to the strains of the Imperial March from Star Wars. He acted as my rear guard and smashed any that landed on me. I still managed to end up with a couple dozen bites on my legs, face, and arms. His cotton full body armor kept him relatively bite-free.

I wonder if I have West Nile virus?

On Sunday morning I woke up early, as I seem to be prone to doing lately, and went for a jog at 8 a.m. As I left the house, the weather was cloudy, humid, and still. I like to run in a hilly neighborhood a few blocks north of my house, and to get there I walked along the edge of a large park.

By the time I felt the first bite, a few dozen mosquitoes had attached themselves to the backs of my legs, happily sucking my blood and leaving their little disease-ridden venom gifts in return. I freaked out and frantically tried to swat them off (managing to satisfactorily squish a lot of them), but more kept coming at me. I took off running and realized that a big cloud of mosquitoes was following me! It took me several blocks, a couple of right angle turns, and a lot of swatting and smushing to get rid of them. Passing drivers must have thought I was having some sort of insanity fit, flailing and running and slapping myself.

I guess that I walked through a low-hovering cloud of them somewhere along the edge of the park. It’s no surprise with all the rain we’ve been having. Every time I walk out of my house, even if it’s just to get the mail, I end up with 2 or 3 bites.

I’m itchy as all hell today.

If you notice me exhibiting flu-like symptoms in the next few weeks, alert the paramedics that I might have West Nile virus.

On a semi-related note, one of my favorite made-for-SciFi-Channel movie titles is “Mansquito!” It sounds like a terrible movie, but what an awesome title!

Brittney spotted this crazy glossy fungus growing at the base of a tree this evening. Parts of it look like apricot jam, parts of it look like mushrooms. Mmm…. mushroom and jelly sandwich… :)