* I discovered a way to sleep better in the summer - use an eye shade. Not that there's so very much light leaking into my room (Though the digital display on my clock/radio/CD-player-that-doesn't-play-most-of-my-CDs-anymore is annoying to me). Normally the small amount of light doesn't bother me but it seems when there are other things (heat, humidity that would militate against my sleeping well, even little things drive me BONKERS. (Which is why some summer nights I have been known to go "Won't SOMEONE put a MUZZLE on that blasted DOG" when the neighbors leave their dog outside at night and it barks).
I can't wear earplugs for the noise (barking dog, the occasional selfish idiot in a super-stereo-equipped car who thinks we all want to hear his music at 2 am) because I am afraid I wouldn't hear the smoke alarm if it went off. (way back in my dorm days, I wore earplugs one night because I had an exam the next day and people were being loud. There was a fire drill - or more likely, someone pulled the alarm as a prank - and I was almost the last one out of the building. I woke up, but I interpreted the noise as "someone is vacuuming" and was ready to go back to sleep when I realized that while my dorm-mates did many things at 1 am, vacuuming was generally not one of them.
But an eyeshade helps. (I use a cheapie one from the drugstore, but I admit to kind of wanting to make one and applique Rarity-style eyes on it, a la the eyeshade that Holly Golightly used. Because Rarity has the prettiest and fanciest eyes of any pony.)
* I'm up to the raglan decreases on the back of the Boxed Raglan. I'm....not sure how I feel about the yarn. The colors are pretty but the yarn seems like it's going to pill like crazy, and I don't like that. It feels....cheaper than it actually was, if you get what I mean.
* I also started (but didn't get very far on) the Sea Pony last night. The brown I have is darker than the actual brown of the figurine of Cherry Spices, but whatever. It looks good with what I chose for the hair. I will say after a long time of working on in-the-round amigurumi that you make as a spiral, it's challenging to remember how to do the "join the end of every round" bit, and I will be glad when the body section is done and I shift over to just doing the "standard" amigurumi way.
* The big insect book (Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity; Stephen A. Marshall) came the other day. Oh, wow. It's really, really worth the price - fantastic pictures, and, I didn't see this in the library copy I looked at but he has keys at the back and his hymenoptera key is a lot more comprehensible to me (i.e. written for a biologist who knows basic insect anatomy but is not an expert) than the "expert" keys I had found. So I'm back on track trying to identify my dead bees. (I am already pretty good at figuring out halictids - they have an odd little feature of the wing venation that seems to be unique to that group. Well, also, most of them are small and many of them are iridescent.)
I also have to smile because it's published by Firefly Books. Very appropriate.
* I did go back out in the field (just to observe, not to trap) yesterday but am concluding that it's time to shut down the afternoon observations for now: there is considerably less activity. Actually, at some point, when the common flowering stuff shuts down for summer I will stop doing observations on such a regular basis and maybe just do once every two weeks, rather than twice a week. And then return to a more rigorous schedule this fall once the goldenrod and stuff start flowering.
* That said: I did see a Giant Swallowtail yesterday. They are huge and impressive, and their bodies are a pale yellow color - unusual for a butterfly.
* One of the things we used to call a "sweat bee" when I was a kid (tiny little insect, looks like a mini bee, with a black and yellow striped abdomen) is actually a syrphid fly - I kind of guessed that when I saw them again and saw they only had 1 pair of wings. But it's good to know for sure.
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