- 2,000,000 BC: fire discovered.
- 1874: Othmar Zeidler synthesizes DDT.
- 1934: Enrico Fermi and colleagues split the atom.
- 2008: Mig discovers ebay.
This weekend we celebrated father’s day in Austria. I tried to spend quality time with my family, when I wasn’t checking ebay for deals on an electric cello, and maybe a musical saw. Beta gave me tasty cookies, Gamma tasty ice cream, and we went out to a Mongolian barbecue that is new in town.
The food is not bad at the Mongolian place, but I question the concept of all-you-can-eat restaurants, especially at a time when I am trying to eat less than all I can.
But the weather was perfect all day. Then it rained at night, which is a sound I love, rain, especially at night; but then it rained harder and harder, so that I couldn’t fall asleep, and got up and checked on the pool, which I could totally imagine bursting in all that rain and flooding the cellar. But it was okay. A little full, but otherwise okay.
Yesterday I put the pot of lettuce plants onto the picnic table in our yard because the slugs had totally discovered it, and I figured if I move it it’ll confuse them for a while.
We went for a walk in the woods this weekend, Alpha, Beta and I. We walked past one small pond and heard, for the first time, sad frogs. I guess it’s a new kind of frog. They sounded like sad pan flutes. It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, and made me want to buy a portable recording device so I could record it if I ever heard it again, and stick it into a composition or something.
I don’t understand how metamorphosism became a music blog. I am about as equipped to write a music blog as a bug stuck to the windshield of a truck is to write an automotive blog.
- Driving rawks!1!
I’ll eventually get over it.
A hedgehog was walking around our yard in the daytime yesterday. He was all, dude where are the slugs? You moved the lettuce or something! I tried to give him a dish of catfood, but he said no thanks and went back into the bushes after a while.
In the evening, just as the first gentle rain was starting, Alpha and I sat on the terrace and had a glass of wine and listened for hedgehogs. She heard one scratching himself, but he was too well-hidden to see.
You know, I’ve just been contemplating this large, long-legged, hairy spider in my bathtub. Then I read your blog and thought to myself, “You know what? I’d really prefer a hedgehog. Or even slugs. Sad frogs would be cool too. Anything but this freaking spider.”
I have a contract with all eight-legged entities that enter my domicile. So long as they do not cross into my personal space, they are permitted to continue existing. “My personal space” is defined as “any area I might choose to occupy to perform one task or another.” So the spider in the bathtub will be permitted to continue attempting to climb the sides and failing miserably and whatever other spidery activities he wishes until such time as I decide to take a shower. If he has not vacated the premises by then, he shall die a most unpleasant death of scalding hot water.
The last spider to hang above my living room heater (which I wanted to turn on, because it was rather cold in there) got death by hairspray. He may or may not have been actually dead, but he was certainly immobilized once it dried. Which is actually pretty wicked cool, when you think about it. The best kind of spider to have in your house is the kind that isn’t moving and waving its legs about.
I suggest catching him and putting him outside. Spiders are good luck.
A big, long-legged, heavy-duty hairy spider nearly killed me once. It was hiding in my towel and came this close to giving me a heart attack when I dried off after a shower.
I don’t know which of us was more scared. He ran away and I never found him again.
any hedgehog photos this year mig?? I just realized that I have been reading your blog for about a year now and the first blog that I read was about hedgehogs!!
Oh and what happened with the publishers?
Taking spiders by one of their many, fuzzy little hands and leading them back outside was my ex-husband’s job. Me, I just kill the little suckers.
I forget which culture that spiders=good luck thing is from (Japan?), but I’m not from there. :)
Meagan: Actually I think it’s Italian.
Could very well be, though I think I remember reading of it in something Japanese as well.
But if it’s not American or Mexican, I cannot very well be considered to be any sort of authority. :)
i’d really like to hear the sad frogs.
That wasn’t a hedgehog. It was me.
;)
My philosophy: if I can’t create something, I have no right to destroy it; spiders I leave alone (after all they catch and eat flies and other insects). If someone else objects, I catch the spider with a piece of newspaper (this is not difficult) and take it outside. Poisonous spiders I kill (reluctantly); we have black widows in California. Also mosquitos; they carry diseases.
ja, i’ll swat a mosquito too. not sure about poisonous spiders in Austria. i have mixed feelings about killing ants. they’ve pretty much taken over our yard, and i’ve left them alone so far, but now they’re moving into the kitchen, i’m not so crazy about that.
I kill ants in the house, but not outside. In CA, I have thousands of them in my kitchen; in Buffalo where there were just a few, I left them alone.
Spiders mean good luck in Denmark as well. But oddly enough, I feel quite lucky anyway.
I’m quite fond of spiders as outdoor creatures (providing they’re not building webs across my front porch that I have to knock down/walk through unwittingly in order to get to my car). But as far as I’m concerned, when they come inside it violates the Geneva Convention and quite possibly a few other laws and treaties as well (at the very least, it’s breaking and entering) and they have forfeited their rights and exist only on my sufferance. My sufferance ends when the spider has been hanging out in my bathtub for two days and I want to take a freakin’ shower.