metamorphosis

remember those cecropia moth caterpillars i over-blogged last summer? they have finally hatched. i don't know how many eggs we started with, but we ended up with two adult moths, who have been sitting trapped inside a glass aquarium on the back porch at oak knoll for i don't know how long because i thought the things were all dead and hadn't bothered to check on the cocoons in months. i don't know if i found them on the exact right day or if they had been sitting in there trying to escape since last thursday. the adult moths don't live for long- just a couple of weeks- and they don't eat during the time. their one purpose is to mate. so maybe, if things worked out fortuitously, those two moths just had the time of their lives. there is a great series of cecropia moth images here.

i call this one bashful.

what do we have here?

the funny book from aunt nitzi

the book, "bitter with baggage seeks same" is a series of photos of little plastic chicks (by which i mean baby chickens and not hot girls) in different entertaining scenarios. my favorite picture is the first one.

dad uses the bird book

we went to the beach for some birding

mom, dad, matt and i headed down to allen's pond wildlife sanctuary to do some birding for bird-a-thon. we discovered that we know very little about birds and that the rocks on the beach are pretty.

mind the gap

matt's ex-roommate jess had a link to the gapminder website on her blog- i was particularly amazed by the changes in the population and life expectancy in rwanda. i feel like a little bit of a rwanda expert because i saw the excellent movie "hotel rwanda" starring don cheadle and that really helped improve my understanding of the situation. i guess i missed most of what was going on there in the early nineties, when the life expectancy in rwanda dropped to just 24 years and population decreased by more than 800,000 people, because that wasn't a time when i was really "up" on current events, unless by current events you mean what happened on the most recent episode of "friends."

mmm, ice cream

alexis made me this ice cream cone. i have tried to eat it three different times, but it has never worked out.

a mother's day card from my "kids"

they gave this to me right after they went outside and ate goat turds and then tried to lick my face. what good kids.

the bees are doing fine

many of you have asked about recent stories in the news regarding the strange disappearance of honeybees. for reasons that remain unknown, honeybees all across the country have been abandoning their hives and, well, disappearing. what is causing this strange, non-honeybee-esque behavior? pesticides? cell phone signals? the dip in the housing market? or possibly it is the reason that so many other things are going wrong in the world today- dick cheney. no, wait, i mean global warming.

anyway, without honeybees, crops don't get pollinated and our food production system is destroyed. we need our honeybees and i hope they soon get to the bottom of this mystery and that the solution does not involve me no longer being able to talk on my cell phone.


matt's bees are doing well- enjoying their colorful hive and already building combs and making delicious honey. but perhaps that is because we live in a cell phone signal-free zone.

birthday cupcakes from adria

don't mind if i do.

birthday hike

matt and i went for a very nice hike on my birthday. i took the day off from work so that i could sit at home and feel bad about getting older and also so i could wait for my presents to arrive. we went to a property owned by the trustees of reservations (mass audubon's arch rivals) in dover and climbed to the top of this hill where matt claimed you could see the boston skyline (only in the winter, as it turns out). we brought both dogs and the great new dog toy that makes the loudest dog toy noise you can imagine. i now use this toy to summon the dogs. they hear the horrendous squeak and come running from any distance. we tried to get nina to go for a swim but she just stood in the water and looked flustered.

all quiet on the southern front

matt had a colonoscopy and an endoscopy yesterday and all is well. the procedures did give him a mean case of the hiccups which lasted, on and off, for about 20 hours.

first honey of the season

matt had to reconfigure his hive system last week, which gave us a chance to sample the early efforts of his bees. it was waxy and delicious.

there's a fly on the wart on the frog on the bump on the log at the bottom of the sea

can you see it?

incoming!

shimmery pig 'tocks

an ineffective boar

since boris was unable to impregnate either of the sows at the farm, they had to go ahead and buy piglets from someone else. this situation is unfortunate for a number of reasons:
1. we wasted a lot of time taking care of the pigs over the winter
2. we wasted a lot of food taking care of the pigs over the winter
3. the pigs that we kept over the winter completey destroyed the land on which they were kept.

but the good news is that the new imported piglets are so much cuter than anything we could have expected here on the farm because they are multi-colored like piggy easter eggs. here are a few of them (note: i find their rear ends to be even cuter than their fronts):

FYI

one week until my birthday. the big 3-2. presents will be graciously accepted. the day will also be the one year anniversary of matt's surgery. he is doing so much better now than he was a year ago. he is healthy and fun and relaxed and if it weren't for the colony of ants we just found living in our cabinet, i would even go so far as to say he is happy.

don't let the kids see- this one's gross

while strolling through the woods with a group of preschoolers today, we stumbled upon this:

a snake eating a gray tree frog. i thought about seizing the opportunity to discuss the circle of life, etc... but decided to let the parents handle that one. instead, i made them stand by while i attempted to photograph it for my blog. unfortunately, the frog let go of the giant stick it was holding on to, which had made for some really moving imagery. fortunately, the frog's foot is still clenched in a stick-grasping form, so you can envision what it looked like before it let go. i think this snake was very ambitious.

forsythia in bloom