Dig what I just saw in the back yard wild kingdom…
Looks like a praying mantis to me. I Googled “brown praying mantis” and sure enough, there are brown praying mantises. Groovy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these for real before. What an ugly SOB (though not as ugly as a house centipede, those bastards look like pure, unadulterated evil). I would have squished it, but I think she could probably take me in a straight up fight.
I posted something the other day about having a bad experience trying to get a haircut. Checking in early only to have to wait a ridiculous amount of time, and being in a large crowd in a confined space in the time of Covid… granted the state of emergency for Covid was lifted last week so I guess I can’t technically say it’s still the time of Covid. Whatever, I didn’t feel safe.
I am going to try again tonight after work. I booked a 6:00 appointment. Here’s hoping I get right in because they close at 7:00. My hair really needs to be cut. I look like bozo the idiotic clown right now. The mirror cried “uncle” this morning and I have to appease it.
Unrelated story, I bought a fly swatter the other day. I was at the grocery store and I saw it and that was literally the definition of an impulse buy. The idea behind it was to keep it at my work desk in the cellar and use it to eliminate bugs with extreme prejudice. Spiders mostly, but also little flying assholes that I don’t have a name for that often annoy me while I work. Earlier today, the swatter tasted insect blood for the first time and it liked the taste. It is thirsty for me.
There was a yellowjacket buzzing around. It was loud and obnoxious and clearly in a shitty mood. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t go anywhere that I could get a clear shot at it with the new fly swatter. It just wouldn’t stop flying around long enough, and when it did it stopped in a spot that I couldn’t swing my weapon with any accuracy.
If flew into one of the lamps and I thought a spider got it. It was quiet for a few minutes. Good riddance, I thought. But no. It flew out of the lamp with spider webs wrapped around it and trailing behind. It was clearly in distress and couldn’t fly very well. I saw my chance. It landed on the wall behind my desk for just a second and I struck. The sound of the fly swatter slapping against the wall was deafening (no it wasn’t, I am just being overly dramatic) and the bee fell to the desk. It was alive but severely injured. I struck again and the invader lived no more. Rest in peace, asshole.
I grabbed my little waste basket and swept the corpse off of the desk into it. It was then that I saw the little inch worm/caterpillar looking prick that had been hiding under the basket. The fly swatter tasted bug blood once again.
Something tells me my impulse buy will go down in history as money well spent. Money very well spent.
My X-Files rewatch is in season three. Deep Space Nine is still in season two. Strange New Worlds is almost done. Before all of this started I rewatched The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. I recently rewatched Rebels. Over the last week I rewatched Andor (best Star Wars Disney+ show by miles and miles) and two nights ago I started rewatching Obi-Wan Kenobi.
I don’t want to stop with the two non-Star Wars shows, but I am really feeling the ol’ Galaxy Far Far Away vibes right now. Three more episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi and I’ll be out of live action shows on Disney+. Does this mean I am going to have to watch The Clone Wars from start to finish? That would include both seasons of The Bad Batch as that is really just The Clone Wars part two, right? Clone Wars has episodes with Jar Jar though… do I really want to go through that again? On the other hand, it would be a good prep for Ahsoka, which comes out in August.
On an unrelated note, I restarted another thing from last year this morning. The Great Spider Hunt of 2023 is on like Donkey Kong. While running in place this morning (yogging) I saw a HUGE sucker crawling up the wall behind my desk. I removed him/her from the equation with extreme prejudice. I expect there to be hundreds more to follow over the next couple of seasons.
On another unrelated note I haven’t played my guitar yet this month. I have a bunch of little song ideas, mostly just riffs, in progress, but I only have one song form sketched out and I haven’t plugged the guitar in at all. I still haven’t played through the King of Tone pedal after 5+ years on the wait list. Sigh of frustration. I’ll figure it out.
Okay. Time to go shower and get ready for work. Happy Tuesday, said the ancient 52 year old.
Picture it: 2010, sitting at my desk in Framingham. I went through a stretch at work that was probably the most frustrating and difficult and stressful couple of months of my whole 18 years at this company. There were two customers. One was really tough on us and found a lot of issues that were tough to solve and fix. They were good people, and when they found out the two of us who were supporting them were hockey fans they actually gave us each a little souvenir miniature jersey for their local hockey team. The other customer was the nicest folks you’d ever want to meet, but their entire system blew up on them when they switched everything on in their live environment and keeping them afloat was just awful. I joke that I still have nightmares about it… but am I joking?
This morning I spent some time working in the first customer’s system. Nothing special. I just delivered a couple of snippets of custom code. It was all straightforward and simple, but I did have a minute where I thought back to how tough they were 12 years ago and felt glad things aren’t that way anymore.
This afternoon the nice folks reported an issue that was similar to something that happened when everything went bad for them and now I know what trauma flashbacks feel like. Oh my goodness. I started sweating and my heart rate shot up. It turned out to be a simple issue with a very simple fix, but damn if I wasn’t stressing out like mad for a few minutes there.
Woah, man. 2010 all over again. How weird was that?
The spider hunt from this morning can now be more accurately called the spider massacre. The current kill count is seven. Seven spiders dead. I saw one on the wall in the corner and when I leaned in to squish it, I saw two more tiny spiders hanging out close by. I saw an eighth spider, a great big sucker, near the floor in the corner by my desk, but I couldn’t reach it. I’ll have to go back for it later.
More important than the on-going spider massacre, I ran into the most evil creature on Earth in the bathroom. A House Centipede. Vile, disgusting, evil beyond measure. The House Centipede (capitalized out of respectful horror) is the only creature that is so terrible to look at that I have legally sentenced the entire species to death. I murderlized it with merciless fury. I was lucky it didn’t try to run away when I went after it. Those sons of bitches run fast.
Lunch break is coming to an end, so let me share a photo from early this morning. I filled the bird feeders and took a picture with a blurry background. Oh, yeah. I took one like this on film too. At some point before the decade ends I’ll get that roll developed and we’ll see if it came out okay.
Until then, enjoy the digital version:
I’ll explain later……
Dragonflies eat mosquitoes, therefore I love them. It’s science.
I was just outside cooking chicken on the grill. Out in the yard with me were a great big bunch of dragon flies. They were circling around like mad, darting this way and that. There must have been a major increase in the mosquito population or something like that, because those dragon flies were hunting like crazy. I actually some how managed to see a dragon fly grab a mosquito out of mid air. Bye bye, you blood sucking vampire mosquito asshole.
Dragon flies are my favorite bugs.
Inside the Red Head's Head 