Incidents and accidents

Back at the end of September, I blogged about finding a giant green catterpillar at work. It turned out to be a Polyphemus Moth, one of the biggest moths here. We’ve been having a lot of storms as of late here, with a lot of wind. It’s been blowing a lot of branches and leaves out of the trees around work. Well, a few day ago, I found what looked like an empty cocoon. The outside looked whole, but it was too light to have anything inside. I tossed it by the fence, curious to see if anything came out eventually. The day after that, I found another, blown down by another storm. This one, was quite heavy. I tossed it beside the first one, figuring whatever was in it was long dead. Yesterday, i found a third one, blown down again. I finally said to hell with it and took this one home. I did a little research and found that it’s the cocoon of the green catterpillar! It will hatch a lovely Polyphemus Moth in May! I hung it outside so it can hatch in May. I’ll go back on Monday and pick up the other two, as well as any others I can find.

I listen to a lot of music, but it’s all different music. I don’t buy much either. For those of you who listen to new music all the time *cough*Scott*cough*, this may come as a bit of a shock. Here’s a few artists that I would buy or have bought their albums:

Rob D/ Rob Dougan: His wonderfully graveley voice lends itself perfectly to the industrial beats and melodies of his songs. Some of them don’t even have lyrics!

Weird Al Yankovic: I own every CD he’s published but for three compilations. I prefer his earlier stuff, but most of the recent stuff is pretty good too. I’ve even been to see him live, my only concert.

Audioslave: Moody and slow, but yet powerful. I just want to sing along to just about everything they put out. Very unique lead singer’s voice.

Dave Mathews Band: Not my normal stuff, but it’s very nicely upliting. Slow and melodious, it makes me smile.

David Bowie: From Labyrinth soungtrack to his UK rock, it’s all weird and great.

Enya: Soft, soothing, beautiful. I can sing along with this for hours. It makes me think of how elves sing.

Evanescence: Yes, yes. i know it’s pop, and some people hate them. I, however, love them. The lead singer’s voice is stunningly powerful. I could sing slong in my car with this until I wore my voice out.

Metallica: I love hard rock with melody. It’s not screaming into the microphone with nasty hair… it’s real songs sung with real melodies. With and awesome beat.

Michael Jackson: Yes, I know. Yes, he might touch little boys. Yes, he’s got a nasty nose. Neither of these things impact the sound of his music. I like his songs.

The Cure: Come on. Everyone knows why.

Tracy Chapman: Great voice! Slow-ish beaty songs. Nice to listen to on a rainy day.

Maroon 5: Another somewhat gravely voiced group with somewhat pop-y songs, but I love them.

There are plenty more one-hit-wonders that i love, but I won’t name them all.

I’ve been whining to John for a while about how I want a brown skirt. The ones that are somewhat popular these days. They fall at about mid-calf and are very wide in the hem, making them swing a lot when walking. Larken will tell you I have an adoration for blue and brown, so a brown skirt would be nice to have. Anyway, after whining about it a few days ago again, John says “Why not make one?” and I thought “yeah! Why not?” So I went out and bought the skirt pattern and a sundress pattern. Larken and I will got check out fabric sometime soon. I want to do some fun tops too, like these and these.

The weather here has been so warm that the trees and bushes have started budding again. The lovely lavender rosebush of mine has already sprouted a few new leaves. It’s nutty! It’s been so nice out that i keep looking around for hummingbirds, even though I know they don’t return for another 3 months! It doesn;t help that I got a Michigan Bulb catalog a few days ago. They even have a Butterfly and Hummingbird Garden for dummies like me who can’t grden at all. I really want to buy this at some point, but Muchigan bulb’s customer service reputation is terrible. I’ve ordered once before and did okay as far as gettign the plants, but nothing I planted last year from them survived, so I don’t think I’ll do it again. Plus, planting all those plants hurt! Maybe I’ll go for a less painful route and just buy a Hummingbird wildflower seed mix and throw it all over the place.

The Stump has been eating more and more cat food lately. Either she’s still got worms (likely), or she’s bored (more likely). I’ve been attempting to cut her down on food a little because she’s begining to develop a bit of a pudge on her underbelly. Fat kitties are cute, but she doesn’t need to become a fat layabout. Anyway, we keep the cat food in a big tupperware lock-tite container unless we’ve just bought some. It doesn’t all fit in the container, so the rest gets rolled up in the bag and stored near the bowl. Stumpy runs over to the bag, yowls one big long yowl, then tips her empty food dish over. Well, yes ma’am! So I go over and unroll the bag of cat food, and the photo to the left is what I find. LOL! john’s gone for the weekend, but he knew I’d find it and have a laugh. Silly man.

Like I said, I took the new Macro lens out for a photo-stoll today. I had a ton of fun wandering around in the rain for about an hour. I got some really fun shots, including this one of some sort of tree fungus. It was on a fallen branch, and this is actually the undersides of them. The overparts weren’t nearly as interesting. I had a lot of neat times looking at really small things. Being able to take pictures that close really makes you look at things with a different eye. Several times, I found myself kneeling down to get something a few inches away from my face. I came home with aching hips though, because I bent down too many times with my cell phone stabbing me!

Geekery… is that even a word? Bah, who cares! I have a new lens for the XT! Wheeeee! It came by UPS today. I love it. It’s the Sigma 50mm DG Macro. The damn thing can focus about an inch away, and make just about anything look good. It’s wonderful. The peacock feather to the left is uploaded just as it came out of the camera, no changes. It’ sa big file, but it really shows how close that lens can get. I can see the boogers up Lincoln’s nose on a penny. This lens will also double as my portrait lens, since 50mm is considered to be the ‘norm’ for portraits.
You may also notice that photo’s name is “Canon Digital Rebel XT1000.JPG”. That’s right, it’s the 1000th photo out of my XT. I haven’t been shooting as much with it as I should be. I mean, I just got the tiny Canon s400 a few days ago and I’m up to over 200 already. I’m taking the XT out tomorrow to see what wacky things I can get into the world of close-ups.

On Monday, John and I had planned to go to the new Georgia Aquarium. It’s about a hour from here, so we hopped in the car and went. Before we left though, I had to ship out the Sony to it’s new home in Alabama. As we were heading out to do that, someone knocked on the door. It was UPS with my new tiny-canon! My old-new (I owned a Canon s400 before the Sony) s400 had arrived from it’s old home in Calafonia, so I was happy. I shipped out the Sony, and we drove down to Atlanta with two cameras. We got there just fine, found the aquarium, then saw the signs out front. “No walk-up ticket sales. Sold Out!” Damn! No getting into the fun fish place.
We said ‘Damn’ and went to go get John’s school books for this new semester. I found a pretty notebook with hummingbirds on it, and he was nice to me and let me leave with it. So, we spent the rest of the day wandering the bookstore and the mall near John’s school. Barnes and noble there doesn’t have shit in the way of hummingbird books. I was dissapointed. They did have some nice photography books though. We wandered around the mall for a while, talking about tis and that. John wanted to take a dog home from the pet store there. I wanted a bird. We ended up taking home a black corset with white leaf embroidery on it. It’s similar to this one, only reversed. The embroidery is prettier on mine too. The we got to see Atari and the rest of the PsiU gang at Hooters, so that was awesome. i even got a nice photo of the local marriott in the rain, to the upper left. It’s also on Flickr too.

The camera closed out at $305. This was totaly due to Blixem. He is TEH AWESOME. Really.

I played in a new Eberron game with Justin and a group of his male gamer freinds. They were somewhat shocked to have a female in the group and consequently got nervous, which led to drinking, which led to drunk. This led to them being very loud and very obviously hitting on me. Note to self: make sure all know I’m not single. The game seems fun, however. I’m playing a half-giant fighter with a HUGE greatsword.

Stephen came to visit this weekend. We took him to the Eberron game, where he played a loincloth-wearing fighter. He too had a little too much to drink, and being Stephen, said some things that were somewhat offesnive to the rest of the group. Second note to self: no beer or booze at games. Ever again. He stayed over with us and for lunch we took the customary trip to Taco Stand. It was fun playing with his new camera. He got a Canon sd450 on my advise, but I’ve never played with one before. If memory cards weren’t an issue, I would have bought that one. It was a very windy day, so we took my 50 foot mylar dragon kite out to fly. The wind was a little too rough for it, and it decided to shred itself inside-out. No loss though, as it was only $5.