Stripy socks

I woke up this morning feeling completely wrecked. I think I've been overdoing things a bit recently, plus I currently have a virus that's bad enough for me to have felt that I should do a Covid test (negative, luckily) before choir practice yesterday. So I decided to give myself a quiet day. Maybe a little light gardening...? No, seriously - nothing heavy. Just a bit of cleaning of the patio pond, thinning the emergent vegetation, and removing some blanket weed. And then supervising R as he did some pruning in the front garden...

And then, "Just give me those loppers, will you? I think it needs to be me who cuts this back." And before we knew it, we'd heavily pruned the entire neighbourhood, the front lawn was piled high with debris, and I was whiffling in a corner and snapping R's head off every time he came anywhere near me.

Will I ever learn? Given my age, and the fact that the only reliable predictor of future behaviour is past performance... probably not.

I'm posting this speckled bush cricket nymph this evening because the photo makes me smile every time I look at it, and right now that's all the excuse I need. I swept it out of a clump of yarrow, and scooped it out of my net into a bug pot so that I could grab a record shot before replacing it on the vegetation. So this is what you're seeing: the nymph, back firmly turned to the camera, sitting in a clear plastic pot which I'm holding in the non-camera hand, with the yarrow patch in the background. Speckled bush crickets are quite lovable even as adults, but the nymphs are positively adorable. I love the fact that their striped antennae coordinate so beautifully with their three pairs of stripy socks.

As record shots go, this is one of my better efforts.