The Grapevine Beetle!
I saw this thing clinging to the outside of one of our window screens after a downpour the other day. I had no clue it was so attractive at first since I could only see the underside of it. I sent Arp outside to collect it in a plastic bowl. All of us crowded around it while I snapped a few closeups. It was huge! At least an inch long, maybe even a little bigger. I love those crazy antennas - sort of like the hat of a Vegas dancer. But this bugger only stayed a minute, and then promptly flew off. I let out a startled scream as it took off - it flew fast!
Inside, we all looked it up in our trusty bug manual - National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders. We are only sometimes successful in making an exact match with the bugs we find and one of the pictures in the book. We often have to be satisfied knowing the general family. But this time was an exact match - a grapevine beetle.
Here’s another bugger, a ground beetle, that we found the first summer we moved into this house.
It always amazes me how many interesting insects we find in this area and how the diversity of insects exponentially increases the farther you move away from New York City. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I can’t help it when I am confronted by some new mini-monster. I grew up in a town located approximately 30 minutes outside NYC. That area had very boring bugs - some spiders, lightening bugs, lady bugs, and not much else. Now that we are an additional 60 minutes outside NYC, it seems like bug heaven. Those city folks don’t know what they’re missing.
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We joined a CSA at a local farm recently and have been enjoying our super-fresh, peak of season produce. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. It’s basically a subscription to produce - just like paying a subscription fee and getting a magazine every month, we paid a subscription fee and get fresh produce every week for 6 months.
The farm is a family-owned farm and they were nice enough to invite us for a farm tour the other day. We got a look at where our food comes from, and it was a great learning experience for us and the kids. It was a beautiful day to be out in farmland too.
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Ever since watching Jesus Camp, I’ve been wondering why someone would teach a child that global warming is not real (aside from the pure politics involved). The National Arbor Day Foundation has released updated hardiness zones for planting in the US and, shock of shocks, it’s actually getting warmer in the US. The New York Times chimed in with an article on it earlier this week, stating in it that
Cameron P. Wake, a research associate professor at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said that winter temperatures in the Northeast have increased an average of 4.3 degrees over the last 30 years.
That’s quite a bit more than the figure of 0.6 degrees that a future preacher was learning to memorize in Jesus Camp. Yesterday I was reminiscing about Christmas as a kid, and how my perfect Christmas involved a snowy night and a nice fresh blanket of snow to play in the next day. I think this last occurred in 1979 or so. M’s been asking where’s the snow and we’ve been wondering ourselves. This warmth might feel good and be good for our heating bills, but it is truly disturbing.
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Early last week we got a subscription renewal request from National Geographic - except our subscription hadn’t even started yet. We knew they’re very thorough in their subscription renewal mailings, but this was a new level of efficiency.
OK - the title over-dramatizes our life without mindless tv watching, but it was coincidental that our current subscription started the day I cancelled the satellite tv. They seemed to have paused a bit after cashing our check (a sweet $10 subscription that came out of nowhere) and sent 3 at once. I think we last had a subscription maybe 3 years ago, and it’s like welcoming an old friend back into the house. Except this friend never runs out of cool stories and let’s us decide which vacation slides to skip.
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