mistressofmuses

Monday evening, we got notice from the apartments that we were having another "annual" inspection on Wednesday (today.) This is the fourth annual inspection this year! (Wish they'd just combine some of these.) So we had to spend the rest of Monday evening and a big chunk of yesterday cleaning, making sure all the surfaces were cleaned off, that floors were vacuumed, etc.

We did decide to take a break yesterday and go out for a walk. We picked a local lake that we hadn't ever walked around before. It was very windy, but nice out, and I'm glad we had a chance to get outside for a while.

Because it was so windy, Bella got to encounter ~waves~.


She was interested in them, but not overly bothered.


A bee on a wild rose.

Fourteen more pictures:

Globemallow. Having a good year this year.


A mushroom!


A heron in flight.


Just trees, but liked how green they were against the bright blue sky.


Red-winged blackbird, sitting up tall.


Dead tree. There was a woodpecker hole up near the top, with maybe some nesting material sticking out.


Another red-winged blackbird.


Ladybug larva on a wild rose.


Another ladybug larva on another wild rose.


I wish this little damselfly had been in better focus! But such a nice blue.

Back at the eastern shore of the lake, Bella got to take a look at more little waves.




She was very interested in the noise the water was making.


Bella blep.


And another tree with bunches of woodpecker holes!

Glad we got to go out and be outside for a bit!

On Saturday we opted out of the group hike, since my mom wasn't sure her foot would be able to handle it. She felt okay to walk, just on easier terrain.

We picked two attractions along the Arizona Boardwalk. The first one was Butterfly Wonderland.

I'm very familiar with the Butterfly Pavilion here in Colorado, having interned there for a year. This place was similar, but also had some definite differences.

The biggest difference was that the Butterfly Pavilion is specifically an invertebrate zoo. They have sections devoted to non-butterfly insects and arachnids, plus the water section devoted to invertebrates of the ocean. There are a couple fish in the ocean section (something my internship supervisor was very opposed to, lol, but she was overruled because kids love to see Nemo and Dory, lol), and there's a dove that lives in the conservatory (having been "donated" years and years ago, so he gets to live his life out there) but for the most part there are no vertebrates.

Butterfly Wonderland bills itself as "A Rainforest Experience," so they do have vertebrates of various types as well.

But time for the butterflies!


I was very taken with how shiny the blue on this guy was! He looks like a holographic sticker.


When you match your meal.

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And now for the not butterflies!


There's a koi pond in the butterfly conservatory!

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After this, we sat outside by the carousel for a while to let Taylor have a break. Fortunately they started feeling better, and we were able to head to the aquarium after a little bit.

Mostly I just feel really behind. The whole *gestures* everything with the election makes it hard to want to do or say much of anything, but I'm trying to get back to doing... something. Catching up here. Writing something.

My break from work was sort of a nothing span of time. We did almost nothing in terms of "going out to do things" and I did almost nothing in terms of "productive personal projects that would have been worthwhile uses of the time."

I spent a couple nights hanging out with Taylor, Sunday (Oct 27th) through Tuesday (Oct 29th). That was fun.

Unfortunately, that Sunday night, Cy started really having a hard time walking. Just about as bad as the first time we'd taken him to the emergency vet. I wasn't home, but Alex was extremely worried. He did start to slowly improve after that, though! Alex was concerned that maybe he'd had a stroke, because his balance was so bad, and he only wanted to turn to the left. I'm more inclined to think it was still just pain, and that moving right was more painful. He wasn't *incapable* of turning the other direction; just reluctant to. He's been continuing to get better, and was back to wanting to run and play by the end of the week, but it was a bad couple of days.

That same Sunday night into Monday, the first katydid, Greenbean, died. :( I knew that late-October - mid-November was about the longest I could expect to have them, but it was still sad to have him go. It's about a month longer than he likely would have lived in the wild, and he overcame that terrible probable-poisoning, and seemed to have a happy month with us, judging by his enthusiastic clicking and eating of green beans.

I miss the clicking. :(

That Tuesday (the 29th), we did our one "go out and do things," which was going to a haunted house. It was fun, though I feel like Alex always goes through them faster than I want to! But there were a lot of cool sets and fun costume pieces. There were two houses: one was nautical-themed and one was more traditional haunted house. Both were neat, but the second one felt a bit more engaging, like it was just better established, maybe. It was a good time, and I'm glad we went.

Halloween itself was kind of a bummer, just in terms of how little we did, but it wasn't *bad.*

Friday (Nov 1st) we did a big grocery trip, but Alex started feeling sick partway through, so I wound up doing most of it solo.

Saturday (Nov 2nd) was a model show. We'd spent much of the week leading up to it doing prep for that, as this one was focused on collectibility (so emphasis on things like age/rarity/condition) rather than the shows we usually go to, where the focus is more on realism. The show... did not go terribly well for us, haha. Not a lot of winners, though the show itself was good. Two of the few winning horses we had were my two from the last couple years of "NaMoPaiMo" - my wisteria stained-glass styled horse (who got second in her class) and my art-deco peacock horse (who got first in his!) I was quite happy about that.
My mom kindly watched the dogs, even though it meant barricading part of her house off so that the cat wouldn't have to see the dogs at all.

Sadly also on Saturday, the second katydid, Moodring, passed away. We suspected it was coming, as she was suddenly eating far less, and then on Friday night she didn't want to move when I got into her cage to swap out her food. :(

RIP, my katydids. I'm glad we had you for a little while, and I hope it was a decent life of green beans and no predators. I miss the clicking.

We are left with somewhere around 30 or more katydid eggs, as Moodring just kept laying them. I don't know how many of them are viable (if any), as the two weren't housed together for very long. There are a few obvious "duds" - ones that are small and dark, obviously different than the bigger, smoother tan ones... but whether they're *actually* fertilized or not, I don't know. We'll keep an eye on them and figure out what to do if we DO wind up with a bunch of katydid nymphs.

Time change has not been terribly kind to me. I am definitely feeling the impact from having it get dark so early.

The election happened on Tuesday and was a bit of a dismal, miserable shock. I still don't have anything better or more meaningful to say about it. I am still afraid of what will be coming.

The return to work was mostly fine, except that now it's dark by the time I leave, which is tough. One of my work friends (our lead instructor) had to go on surprise leave to take care of his father.

We had a major winter storm come through starting on Thursday. It snarled local roads a lot less significantly than expected (Friday night and Saturday morning were supposed to be basically impossible to navigate, but thankfully we did not actually have any trouble.) The storm total by the airport came in at 20", so it was a pretty significant storm! I was super concerned about the potential for broken branches; with the unseasonably warm weather we've had, lots of trees are still leafed out, and I was afraid the snow would break many of them. Also surprisingly less of a problem than I'd expected!

We had a weird power outage on Friday night. Our bathroom light, bedroom light/fan, microwave, and dishwasher stayed on. Everything else, from outlets to stove to other lights, all went out. We messed with the breakers for a good five or ten minutes before we realized that the lights in the apartment hallways were on their emergency power, so it wasn't just us. The parking lot lights were also out. The street lamps were on, but the traffic signals were out. I've never had something like that happen - as far as I knew, all our power to the building came from the same source, and in the past a power outage has knocked everything out, not left a handful of lights and appliances somehow working.

I haven't wanted to write anything much since the election news, though that'll be its own post, probably.

About the only good thing has been reading. I finished Acceptance and have started Absolution.

This "weekend" I decided to get my covid and flu vax out of the way, while we're still allowed to. The pharmacist who did them for me was great - whichever he did first I almost didn't feel at all, and the second only stung a bit. They haven't knocked me down quite as badly as all the previous covid shots have, but I've still felt under the weather yesterday and today. I'm hopeful I feel a bit better tomorrow when I'm back at work, but shouldn't be so sick I can't tough it out.

Unless of course, I'm just also getting sick. I've felt crappy for much of the week, with intermittent sore throat, but mostly just tiredness. That's worse today, but I'm hoping its just my usual side-effects. I've been falling asleep by 8:00 on some nights, but am still exhausted when I get up the next day. Is it getting sick, or just the depression? I can't quite tell.

Last Monday we took Bella to her second FastCAT competition, where she had fun and sort of understood the goal!

Since we were up there, we did decide to drive around Estes Park a little bit. We drove by the Stanley Hotel, but it was mostly blocked off for something, so didn't linger. We'd also hoped to maybe see some elk, but no luck there either.


Coming into town. (You can see the Stanley there, over on the left.)

It was an absolutely beautiful day. I don't remember the last time we had a fall this pleasant and long. It was warm and sunny, but not hot. Absolutely perfect for being outside.

We drove up through some of the "old town" area, which is lined with touristy shops. We obviously had Bella with us, so we didn't go inside anywhere, but it was nice just to be out and enjoying the weather.

We did end up getting ice cream, which was from a shop that was also attached to a taffy store. There were like, three or four shops making and selling taffy, which is more than I would have expected, frankly.


Alex lifted Bella up to look at the taffy machine, but she wasn't terribly impressed, lol.

(Though several passersby were impressed by how cute she was, which she enjoyed much more.)

We sat and ate our ice cream (I got black raspberry, which was delicious; Alex got strawberry cheesecake.)


I spotted a cute moth on some flowers in front of another building.

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Definitely a beautiful day, and I'm glad we got to spend it out!

Had a few relatively busy days, at least for me.

Turns out I spoke too soon on my last post... I'd mentioned separating the two katydids, Greenbean and Moodring, because they seemed to not really get along/possibly stress each other out. I concluded by saying that that meant we weren't likely to get any baby katydids.

Literally right after making the post, I went to harvest some new branches for them and clean out their cages, and...


Those are katydid eggs!

Typically, they'd be attached to a branch or something, but she affixed them to the top of the cage up by the zipper! These are actually in Greenbean's cage, which Moodring has been out of for a while, but I must not have noticed them the last time I did a cage-clean.

I don't know if they'll hatch - typically they overwinter as eggs and hatch once it starts getting warm in the spring. It's possible they won't hatch without the cooler dormancy period, or it's possible they'll hatch much sooner. We'll keep an eye on them, and see if we ever wind up with katydid nymphs.

Sunday:
I went over to my mom and Taylor's house after work. Taylor was finishing up an on-call weekend, but there weren't any emergencies, and we were able to hang out. We played more Final Fantasy XIV, getting through the Four Lords side quest series, which was fun. We also read some more of Sleep No More.


Mocha, stretched out across the back of the loveseat. (I cruelly had to move her so that I could use the folded up blanket. Unconscionable!)

Monday:
We continued hanging out, since Taylor got a comp day for having been on-call over the weekend. We played more FFXIV, getting through the Stormblood part of the Dark Knight quest, which made Taylor flail in their seat and screenshot large bits of dialogue for spoiler reasons that I've already had spoiled. We also started on part 3 of the main Stormblood quest line.

Spoilers for the plot of Dawntrail, from my second-hand spoiled perspective

As far as I can tell, at least one significant part of Dawntrail involves a society that has decided to do away with grief and sorrow by creating simulacrums of their deceased. I think I gather that it's sort of a two-fold thing, where they more or less remove any memories of the actual people, in favor of creating artificial, undying, but also "perfect" versions of them, so that no one has to ever be sad about losing someone important to them, but at the cost of remembering the real versions of them. I could be wrong about some of that! Taylor had not played the third segment of the Dark Knight class quest in a long while, and HEY, TURNS OUT A LOT OF THAT WAS ABOUT THE SAME THING. This little class quest is from YEARS ago, but seems to have inspired the new expansion pretty heavily.

We also finished reading Sleep No More, so next time we will probably start on The Innocent Sleep.


Mocha, all lit up and glowing in the windowsill.

She is the most *talkative* cat I think I've ever known. She also sounds extremely grumpy, like she's unhappy meowing, but that does not seem to ever be the case. She is VERY insistent for food, which I'm glad of. She's eating quite a bit, which is a good thing, because she's so skinny! She is definitely a *little* cat, but she should probably weigh closer to 8.5 or 9 pounds or so, would be my guess. She was 6.66 lbs when picked up by the shelter, maxed out at a bit over 7, then dropped back down to 6.-something after her dental surgery. She's not skin and bones or anything, but you can feel a lot of spine and hips. So I'm glad she's eating well.

I also rescued/relocated a black widow spider from my mom's sink, but she'll get her own post.

Tuesday:
Mocha's talkative nature presents itself the instant someone is awake. Taylor was on the early shift at work, so got up around 5:45, meaning Mocha was up and loud at 5:45, which meant *I* was up by 5:45 at the first yell, too. I'd gone to bed as early as I could, but for me turbo-early is still midnight, ha.

Alex wasn't feeling well in the morning, but eventually he was able to come pick me up, and we went to Hudson Gardens. They are doing a jack-o-lantern festival of sorts, so there are lots of carved (foam) pumpkins around the gardens, which are quite neat. (They'd be cooler lit up, but the nighttime event is a paid, ticketed event.) Walking around during the day is free, ha. Unfortunately, it means that there are a few areas that are closed off (even more so than already, since they'd doing a lot of re-growth of areas that have been eroded.) So less in the way of wildlife to be seen, but still a fun walk. This will also get its own post.

And when I got home, I'd gotten a gift in the mail!


spikedluv told me she'd seen something that made her think of me.
I love her! She is adorable and so soft! <3

Today:
Back to the dentist for a filling. Luckily that was the *only* problem they found at my checkup, and it was one I already knew about.

Back in June, I bit down on a chunk of gravel in some green beans. ("Steam in bag" type green beans.) A couple days after that, I noticed that a small filling had fallen out, so I'm fairly sure that was what caused it. Glad for nothing worse than that! Also glad there wasn't a problem that I waited a few months to deal with it... I thought my appointment was sooner than it was, and even when I realized it wasn't, it didn't hurt so it never felt like an emergency.

(But this healthy eating stuff is crap: I eat green beans, I bite a rock! I eat a salad and a couple weeks later we get a recall notice on our receipt that that salad from a couple weeks ago was recalled for listeria contamination! Dammit.)

I took the day off for the filling, since sometimes when I'm numbed for that it takes a very long time to wear off. It wasn't SO bad today, and I probably could have made a half-day work, but instead I took a nap and I'm really glad of it. Much as I hate that I burned another PTO day, I think catching up on some sleep was a good thing for me.

Last Sunday, Alex texted me a picture of a katydid that he saw outside. Cy had nearly stepped on it, as it stumbled through the grass. Sunday was our one very chilly day, so the katydid was very cold, and probably fell out of a tree. Alex put it back into a nearby tree, but it was sluggish and didn't want to get off of his hand. (Probably because it was warm.)

I jokingly texted back "If you're cold, they're cold. Bring them inside!"

So the next response I got was a picture of the katydid in a big jar on our counter, lol.


Not the picture Alex texted me, but here he is in the jar!

This is likely a broad-winged katydid, and is a male. (Females have an ovipositor.)

We had our first frost warning for that night, so the original plan was to let the katydid go in the morning, since the first frost or two tends to kill them off for the season. But then Alex bonded with him, and wanted to keep him, haha. He felt bad saving him from one frost, just for him to die in the next.

That evening, I selected some branches from the different trees we've heard katydids in over the summer, in the hopes that one of those types of foliage might be to his liking.

Monday, he hadn't really eaten much of any of the leaves, maybe a nibble or two, but we gave him some lettuce out of a salad mix we'd gotten, which he did pretty immediately chow down on.

In the wild they typically die off by the end of September/beginning of October, but one post I found from a woman who keeps some indoors at the end of the summer said she tends to have them until November/December, or rarely January. So they do live at least a while longer in captivity, when protected from the weather change. (Most sources [i.e. comments on reddit] that I've seen suggest at least a few weeks beyond their usual lifespan end.)

He clicked some, that night. (The katydids around here don't have the classic "katy-did, katy-didn't" trill, but do a rapid repeated clicking.) That was encouraging, as the clicking is a call for mates, which typically means they're doing well.

Tuesday, I ordered a mesh butterfly cage for him, as something better than the jar, though it wouldn't arrive until Thursday. We also bought some romaine lettuce for him, since the bigger leaves would give him something to climb while eating, and they instinctively try to move upwards rather than down onto the ground. But since we had more salad, we gave him more lettuce from that, which he ate again.

That night, he clicked a LOT. He was extremely active! I even got to watch the clicking happen, which was neat, because I didn't know how they made the sound. (The internet told me it was their wings that make the noise, but they tend to stop as soon as someone gets close, so I'd never seen the 'mechanism.' It looks like they spread the upper part of the wings [by their "shoulders"] just slightly, and then push them back together, like the two sides of a ziplock bag snapping together.)

Wednesday, when Alex picked me up from work, he told me that he thought the katydid was on his way out. :( He'd been pretty active throughout the morning. Alex washed the lettuce we'd bought for him really well in hot water... but shortly after giving him some, the katydid was down on the floor of the jar, on his side. He'd barely move, and Alex thought he was dead. He weakly kicked a leg when Alex touched him, but couldn't stand upright.

Best guess is that despite trying to wash it well, the lettuce had pesticides on it. :( Alex felt terrible for giving him something that had killed him, and I felt terrible because I was the one who asked him to get the leaf-lettuce for him. I tried to console Alex (and me) that hey, he would almost certainly have died on Sunday if we hadn't brought him in; we've only heard one katydid outside since then, so they're almost all gone.

I picked the katydid up from the bottom of the jar where he was flopped onto his side, and he still struggled a bit, so he wasn't dead yet. His legs seemed to move erratically, like there was something neurological going on. Like nothing was working the way it should, or moving the way it was trying to. His legs would stick out at weird angles, or sometimes get stuck hooked over his back.

I took everything out of the jar minus a paper towel, a cotton ball in a dish of water, and one branch. I put part of a steamed green bean in there, as the only other vegetable thing we had on hand. I figured at the very least we could try and give him a comfortable last few hours. (I know he's an insect. I still feel bad when they suffer.) He did faceplant onto the cotton ball, and seemed to be drinking, even though he couldn't seem to get his legs under him.

Came back to check on him that evening, and even though he still wasn't really able to stay upright, he'd eaten some of the green bean.

Thursday morning, he was still alive, shocking both Alex and me. While his legs still seemed to jerk around in weird ways, like he still couldn't control them, he was more upright, and had eaten more green bean.

(His mesh house was delayed because the delivery person said they couldn't get into the building.)

By the evening, one of his longer back legs was still kind of dragging, or would stick straight up when he tried to move, but he was otherwise moving around like he was okay. He'd even climbed up on the side of the jar again, which he hadn't been able to do at all.

I... was always under the impression that an insect getting any sort of pesticide exposure was pretty much a death sentence. I didn't think it was something that would "cycle out" of their system. Was it a small enough dose that he recovered? Was it pesticide exposure at all? Can insects have strokes??

Friday, he was still improving. He was moving around with only some awkwardness. By the time I got home from work, he seemed even better.

His mesh house arrived. I set up dish of cotton balls in water, a tiny bit of the cricket food that I have for the crickets I buy to feed Berry Mad, and a vase with branches of what seemed to be his favorite of the options we'd provided. (I think it's hackberry.) I also put some more steamed green beans on a skewer for him.


Look at him!


Going to town on the green bean skewer!

Last night, he was clicking like CRAZY. There was a span of five or ten minutes in the middle of the night where it was basically completely non-stop! Kind of loud for the middle of the night in a tiny apartment, but I forgive him.

And today, he's been moving around more and better (his left back leg had still been doing some of the weird erratic motions [you can see it sticking straight back in the picture where he's eating], but has almost completely gone back to normal.) He's climbing the branches I gave him, he's eating his green beans, he's clicking a bunch.

So yup. Greenbean the katydid, named for his favorite food. Our magical, resurrected from near-death katydid!

I do hope we can keep him around for a while longer. They aren't long-lived, but I like them. Seeing the clicking, watching him groom himself, seeing what he eats... I think it's cool to get to watch him up close.

On Monday we went to the park to go on a walk with the dogs, and to brush Cy. (He is shedding ridiculously.)

And we finally saw praying mantises!


A classic pose!

I also got to see a bright green sweat bee:


I love when I see them, but always struggle to get pictures of them. They are very small: about half the size of a honey bee. While these pictures didn't come out perfectly, they're far better than I can usually get.

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On Monday we decided to go over to Pelican Pond (and there were pelicans!) We wanted somewhere we could do a short-ish walk with Bella, but also didn't want to have to go too far.


The sunflowers are doing very well right now. Plus a very nice bumblebee!


Grasshoppers, perched very perfectly on the top of some bent over teasel.

And one of the things I thought was the coolest:


An absolutely enormous wasp nest! It was HUGE, and just barely above head level to the side of the path. It was pretty active, with a lot of wasps coming and going, though they weren't at all aggressive. One started doing a really minor guard position once I'd been there for a minute, so I backed off.

(I almost texted a picture of the nest to my mom to ask her why she hadn't told me about it, since she walks there more often than we do, but I didn't. Then on Tuesday she texted me a picture of it, because that was the first day she'd seen it, haha.)

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It was a nice day, warm, but with a gentle breeze and enough cloud-cover to not feel too overwhelming. A bit more humid, though. Bella acted like she was DYING by the end of it, though it was about the same distance as her usual morning walks with Alex after they drop me off at work, lol. And of course after a power-nap in the car, she was ready to go-go-go again, ha.

(How am I so behind that this was multiple weeks ago now?)

A couple of weeks ago, we also went on a hike to Roxborough state park. It was before the smoke from the fires was too bad, luckily, though the second of the big three had just started that morning.

It was hot, but not horribly, and it was a nice day for a hike! It was also nice to get out and Do Things two days in a row.

The most exciting thing we saw:


A prairie rattlesnake! :D

I was also excited to see a cazador tarantula hawk wasp. I've seen them several times, but rarely in Colorado.


Isn't she pretty?

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It was definitely a nice day, and I was really glad that we got out. It turned out to be even better that we had, because this was the last somewhat clear day before the smoke got much worse. (It was late that night that the closer fire started, and the two farther north got steadily worse for a while.)

Since I was free from jury duty, and we were free to leave the apartment (the smoke detector test presumably completed), we decided to go out briefly yesterday. It was still pretty hot, but to the tune of low to mid 90s instead of 100s.

We didn't feel like doing a lot in the heat, but we decided we could take a quick walk around the xeriscape garden.

Definitely not a ton blooming right now (considering just how hot and dry it's been), but there was some, and we did see lots of bees! So many bees, of so many different kinds!


One of the most interesting bees. I'm not sure what kind they were, but they were very light - almost white. And with such long antennae! It looked really nice against the dark red coneflower.


And bumblebees always make me happy, especially when I can actually get pictures of them!

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It was nice to go out and get at least a little bit of fresh air and sun, even if it was hot sun, ha. Bella came with, and did NOT stick her face in the cactus this time, lol. She did, however, eat seven Japanese beetles. She is doing her part to manage the extremely destructive invasive species.