My Little Friend

This isn't precisely a guilty pleasure, but it is a secret pleasure.

I believe the insect like thing in the photo is the shed of the insect itself - which is over to the right, but you can't see it in this shot. We live in a house that is very dark in most of its rooms, and when I drag my houseplants inside for the winter they all have to cluster in front of the very few windows where there is some halfway decent light. So upstairs, in the bathroom, I have a "garden window" - a little pop out thing that holds not nearly enough - which holds my orchids year round. This winter, because of some not yet completed construction involving two of the windows in the front of the house upstairs, where I usually have plants sitting for the winter, all of my plants are crushed into and in front of the garden window in the bathroom and another window in the bedroom next to that bathroom. Anyhoo - right after I got the plants all situated, I noticed that there were two insects - two of the same sort of insects - on the plants in the bathroom. One of them - the one in this photo - on a Crown of Thorns volunteer that sprung up in my hibiscus, and the other about a foot away from it on an outer leaf of said hibiscus. I check on them every night before bed, and was sorry to find that one of them(hibiscus insect) has gone missing. But this one (Crown of Thorns insect) is still there, and seems to have shed its previous skin and is now fresh and new. I hope the other insect will show up again, but who knows. In any case, they are my secret pleasure - my secret *pets* as it were. There are also a few small pet spiders in that window. I tend to think of anything I see regularly as a member of the family.

Edit - I’m up in the bathroom now and have discovered to my delight that both insects are there - together on the one leaf. The one I thought was a Shell is the missing insect!