sometimes things come up that are beyond your control. for example… that one time last fall, in the middle of trying to crank out sessions, when i simply walked into my laundry room and said…. ‘oh no.’
why, you ask? well. babies. of the praying mantis variety. hundreds of them. spilling out of my laundry room. is this not a problem normal people have?? turns out if you trim your rosebush in the fall, and then stash the bucket of clippings in your laundry room because you forget about them, the heat from the laundry will cause the praying mantis eggs to hatch about 6 months too early. and then you get to carefully, so carefully, try to scoop hundreds of dang little mantis babies back into their bucket and keep them there.
as a responsible, if unwilling, guardian of all the babies, it took many web searches and multiple phone calls to find out that the little guys were basically doomed. as if i didn’t feel bad enough already. but apparently what they would normally eat isn’t super available going into winter and they’re so tiny it’s almost impossible to find food small enough. i talked it over with the dogs. they showed no interest in having 200 or so new siblings. just as we were giving up hope, we heard from a dedicated entomologist willing to try and take them on. boo ya. i snapped some photos before delivering the little guys. they’re like….. really really really hard to shoot… but they’re pretty adorable. and let this be a lesson to you all– the brown crunchy thing that looks like mold on your garden plants is a praying mantis nest and you just leave it the heck where it is.
anyway– sometimes i get a day or two behind on things and sometimes it’s my fault and sometimes it’s a problem you don’t even try explaining because it’s slightly ludicrous. thanks for your patience.
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