Saturday, June 23, 2018

Avast me hearties!!!

Haul yer anchors you scurvy sea-dogs, we sail with the tide!!

Starting the morning with a pirate run is better than a poke in eye with a rusty dagger arrrr!




The dog lasted from the parked car to about the start line... about a block :p


Success!!! Now where be the nearest place we can get some grub?!? Mah belly is gonna eat me!!!


--
The story of my life http://scubajunk.blogspot.com

Samantha Vincent
Samantha Vincent on about.me
 

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

"Quit while you're ahead" they say...

There are expressions that are as much a part of the language as the words it is made of, and yet we do not appreciate them for the wisdom they contain until we fully understand them... at which point it's too late.

I had an incredibly productive weekend, I got a veritable $#!-tonne of stuff done upstairs but the feeling of accomplishment was negated in the space between thoughts. That moment when you get the sinking feeling that something is most likely about to go horribly wrong, when I dropped... *inhale*... and exploded *sigh* one of those stupid twisty cfl lightbulbs at the very top of the stairs *rolls eyes* of course it was at the top of the stairs.

Theeennnn I dropped the LED light bulb I was replacing it with... and killed that one as well (it didn't break... it just doesn't work now! - go figure)

So the price for trying to do *justonemorething* before bed was at least a half an hour of clean up, and a dark tarnish on the previously glowing golden accomplishment of having replaced the bathroom light fixture, moved the bathroom light fixture into the walk in closet, finishing painting the walk in closet, removing all carpet from said walk in closet AND the final remaining piece from my sports closet which was no small task as both closets had to be completely emptied first... and then I put everything back before anyone got home!

*sigh*







Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Butterfly babies!

So we're trying our hand at raising Monarch butterflies, it's been a long arc to get here bits and pieces slowly falling into place.  The winding trail you painstakingly discover while picking your way up the mountain that looks perfectly obvious when you look back.

A number of years ago we saw an incredible Monarch migration film in the IMAX in the Royal Victoria museum called "Flight of the Butterflies", the footage is incredible!


Then we ended up accidentally raising Giant Swallowtails when they chose our tiny Calamansi bush as a host and likely would have decimated it had we not rescued it (and them) lol.

Then we started kicking around the idea of having a butterfly garden which finally became a reality when we got around to planting the front planter box, and decided to help boost the monarch population.

It's been super cool don't get me wrong - but these guys are hard! They're idiots, they wander all over the place,  get stuck, and they're way harder to keep track of despite being fricken yellow! They fall off of leaves... one batch of them got sick from one of the new plants and oozed and died, and apparently there's a parasite you have to watch out for :(  The giant swallowtails were sooooo much easier and more efficient, they basically stake out a leaf, start at the tip of it and work their way back until they're done.  These guys nibble here and there, sometimes chewing on the stem of the leaf before they venture out and eat half of it, and then the leaf falls off because they sabotaged themselves. Idiots...

We we starting to think they were pretty boring until we discovered that they don't like the sound of my voice... and that their angry caterpillar face looked like this! As you can see we have angry teenage caterpillars lol