A Site of Beef by Ann-S-Thesia
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Saturday, August 04, 2001

Bug Journal, Day 4

Supercool caterpillar news. Stan came home from work today not only with some more Milkweed leaves with eggs and a nearly mature Monarch caterpillar, but also with six Swallowtail caterpillars!

When I opened the perforated yogurt containers I was instantly hit with the odor that is peculiar to Swallowtail caterpillars...sort of a pungent rotten apple stink. When alarmed, the Swallowtail caterpillars emit that odor which seems to coincide with the protrusion of a pair of orange horns stemming from a single branch behind their head. I remember collecting Western Tiger Swallowtail caterpillars when I was a kid in Colorado. Those 'pillars were green with large fake eye markings on the front of their body. The ones Stan found are different; these have stripes and dots all along the length of their bodies. We looked them up in our puny butterfly guide book (we really need a better one) and they are either the larvae of Eastern Black Swallowtails or Anise Swallowtails. According to the book, Anise Swallowtails aren't found in our part of the country, but Stan did find them grazing on fennel. Eastern Blacks eat dill, parsnips and members of the carrot family. We do have a lot of hemlock/Queen Anne's lace growing around, but I'm afraid to feed them hemlock although I'm sure it's only deadly to us and not insects. We have some dill to feed them from our garden, but not much. We might have to make a run to the store to buy food for them! Maybe they'll pupate soon before they eat us out of house and home. (Something that unfortunately cannot be said about bad houseguests.)

I was just remarking the other day to Stan that I don't see many Swallowtails around lately. Maybe they're all out by Stan's workplace, which is in a prairie setting. It's a good thing he was able to rescue them...groundskeepers are apt to kill them. To people like that, all bugs are bad; they are unable to appreciate the beauty of insects.

Tonight we must fix the aquariums so that they have room to pupate and hatch...the yogurt containers just aren't cutting it.

At last count we have about ten Monarch caterpillars that are visible, yet still small. That's not counting unhatched eggs. So far, this seems to be the best year yet for raising butterflies.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 6:55 PM || link it email me


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I can't believe how fast-loading my sites are on my new G4 Mac! Modem connection isn't that much faster, however it is faster than the computers upstairs right now...don't know if that's due to the fact it's a better modem, an internal modem (my iBook's internal modem connects faster than the external modem on my old G3 too) or if it's because the phone line is shorter than the upstairs phone line. But I suspect the main thing is the processing speed. It's good to know that I designed my sites for a slow connection and that they are actually pretty zippy on a fast computer with a dial-up. Imagine they must be instantaneous with a non-dial-up connection. The only problem I found was that my Flash animation on the main page of Eyeblog would freeze my G4. Didn't do that to the other computers...I have no idea what it was, but I removed the sounds at the end and that seemed to do the trick. I don't get it...one of those mysteries.

The old guy across the street is out there bright and early mowing his lawn with his ghastly polluting power mower. Power mowers should be outlawed in old neighborhoods like this where houses are on small lots. There's no reason someone can't use a push-mower...even old guys. And his lot is flat, unlike ours which is on a hill. Looks like he expends more energy trying to push the heavy thing around and trying to get it to start than if he just got a push mower that was light weight and didn't need to be jump-started.

I did a 'pillar count...five in one jar, two visible ones in another, and some invisble ones (I know they're there by the turds) in another jar. Found four more eggs today...one is dark and looks like it's about to hatch. Can't believe my eyes are still so good as to find things as miniscule as eggs. I am nearsighted however. Seeing things on the road is another matter.

Will exchange this monitor either Monday afternoon or Tuesday for a new one they ordered for me that hopefully will not have the color inconsistencies (crossing fingers). Microage is a nice place to do business with (no they're not paying me...I just want them to stay in business so I don't have to deal with CrapUSA in the future).
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 8:51 AM || link it email me



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Friday, August 03, 2001

Disney Witch of the Day award goes to the freak customer at Ginza's who was waiting with her SO for a table or tea room, saw us leaving, had plenty of room to move to the side to let us pass, but just stayed in one spot ("I think she's growing roots," Stan said), and stared straight ahead as if catatonic, as if we weren't there, as if her own mission--to look pissed--reigned more supreme than anyone else's. I slowed down while I tried to squeeze between her and the person sitting at the bar, attempting to hint to her that it's a tight squeeze and I'm trying to be careful not to bump into her. Sometimes I think obesity would serve as an advantage in a situation like this. Had I been overly wide, there's no way I could've maneouvered between her and the bar without at least bumping her arm. Also perhaps a nice spiky blue mohawk would've come in handy as well...I'd like to see her not step aside for someone with a spiky blue mohawk.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 11:19 PM || link it email me


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Bug Journal, Day 3

The murderous tyranical dictators that Stan and I are, we decided to have a caterpillar holocaust. After a little bit of research, a letter from someone reading my blog, and my own initial visceral reactions to the little furry twitching beasts, er, CaterBorg or BorgPillar, we decided to drown them. (Don't worry...all Monarchs are safe and doing well and growing!) The freakout thing came yesterday when I looked at them in their jar and they were starting to form a community web. These were not butterflies. These were not cool moths. These were probably Gypsy moths, and if not Gypsies, then some horrid vegetation-destroying parasites. Funny that despite our noble intentions, our actions turned out to be more noble. We thought we were going to incubate and raise some lepidoptera form...maybe Red Admirals (there were tons of them this year and it's so hard to tell when the caterpillars are so very small and young just what they are). Instead, we probably saved some tree from destruction.

It was rather sad...I mean they did give me the willies, but Stan's insistence that "they're cute" and admonishing me for being prejudiced had me warming up to them, if only to please him. But releasing them would have been irresponsible. I felt like George putting Lenny out of his misery.

Before the holocaust, Stan collected any left over ones he could find on the butterfly bush where our captive ones came from. He put them in a jar and then drowned them, left them overnight in the jar sealed airtight.

It was gross.

The Monarch 'pillars continue to grow. Jars where we only put Milkweed leaves with eggs are now showing signs of hatchlings: miniturds on the bottom. Turds are good.

I will shoot pictures of them when they are larger...as of now, the largest one is less than an inch long and about one sixteenth of an inch wide and it just wouldn't show up with my camera.

-----

I feel like I've been living in slow motion the past few days. Most my time has been spent trying to install things on my new Mac. Most things, especially programs, work fine and dandy running Classic. The only program that didn't work is Fontographer. In order to use Fontographer, I have to be in System 9.2...not just running Classic out of OS X. I bet it doesn't help that Macromedia hasn't upgraded/updated Fontographer since 1995. Also, the Photoshop Plug-In Panopticon Alpha Strip Pro tends to crash Photoshop a lot. But that's probably just peculiar to that plug-in as it does it on my iBook running Sys. 9.0 and my G3 running Sys. 8.1.

I cannot use any external USB drive with my G4. I tried attaching my Que! CD-RW drive to it (so I can copy my CDs) as well as my ClubMac external hard drive. Both those I use with my iBook. And that's where they'll have to stay, too. Not too much of a big deal, I mean, I can use my iBook to copy CDs for customers while I still have my work machine free to work, right? And I do need somewhere to keep the stuff I do on my iBook as it only has 3 Gigs of hard drive space, meaning I only have about 300 megs left for storage. Still, it's annoying that it doesn't work. Things like that bother me. My Canon Digital Camera works fine with it though. I think it's just a USB drive thing, not a USB device thing.

Haven't tried attaching my SCSI drive to it though...I have a SCSI adapter on my G4...haven't tested it yet.

I guess I can't measure productivity only in terms of what I create, but I feel like I've been very unproductive. All this technical administrative stuff getting my new 'puter ready and not enough art time.

-----

Since we didn't go out on our birthdays, we're belatedly going out tonight to get Sushi. Not much to celebrate...just a new computer, new Monarchs. Guess that's enough.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 4:43 PM || link it email me



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Wednesday, August 01, 2001

So I got the new 'puter and monitor. Wanna know something weird? You know that dream I had where my monitor was defective? Well, I must be psychic because my monitor's defective. Not like the way it was in the dream (heh...can you imagine?), but there's a slight flicker in the upper left corner and it's slightly off-color there, plus there's an obvious pixel missing over on the right side. Weird, huh? I tried degaussing and "purity"-izing to no avail. (It's a Viewsonic 19" flat screen). Never had problems with a Viewsonic before. Bad thunderboomers tonight so I'm not turning it on...don't want anything to happen to it before I return it (hopefully, they can replace it for me)

Yeah, OS X is a trip. Have to read up on it before I mess around with it much. Another weird thing, the 'puter came with a CD-RW drive already installed but I'm not sure how to use it....do I have to install Toast? And my pre-installed Zip drive...don't I need Zip tools for that? Can't find them on my new Mac, but then again, I haven't had that much time to experiment.

The van's muffler fell off so we had to drive the Monza over to Microage to pick it up. The boxes barely fit in the hatchback. I was fearing that the car would stall and we'd be stranded in the heat with expensive computer equipment in the back with a hatch that wouldn't close. Fortunately, the trusty Monza made it home. It was in the 90s today with heat indices over 100, so we're driving in this small BLACK exterior/interior car (a great car in winter!) Monza without AC (removed the AC because we're not going to use the car for long X-Country trips...just Stan's work commute with stop and go traffic so it was more environmentally and economically sound to do without it) and I about had a heat stroke when I got home so I had to rest in bed. This heat makes me STOOOPID. I feel like I had a lobotomy, and my speech patterns and vocabularization and word recall makes me sound like...well, a moron. We went to Office Depot to pick up some stuff and I was trying to explain to a worker there what it was I wanted...he must have thought I was drunk. Nope, soberer than a Mormon picnic...just extremely heat fatigued.

I can't believe the NFL makes those guys practice in this weather. That is so sad what happened to that Vikings player. Maybe this will cause them to think that what they're doing to those guys under these extremes just isn't the worth the risk of life. Unfortunately, it probably won't change anything.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 8:22 PM || link it email me


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Stan harvested a bunch of Monarch eggs at work the other day, and yesterday we harvested a bunch of eggs as well as hatchling caterpillars from the butterfly bushes in our yard. I do not know how well the eggs will fare...will they hatch if the leaves they are on dry out? I know we harvested eggs last year and they did hatch and make little ones, but this year we are having an incredibly hot summer, so I don't know. There are so many this year that we are considering using one of our old aquariums for them as they mature into large caterpillars. As well as the Monarchs, we also found some strange caterpillars that freaked me out a little. Now I usually pride myself on the fact that I am not a priss. I can handle bugs...no prob. I adore crickets and katydids and lust, in a buglover sort of way, for large silkworm moth caterpillars like Cecropias. I yearn to see a longhorn grasshopper, hold a walkingstick, and watch a luna moth in "real life," not in an enclosed butterfly garden. Once in high school when a boy tried to freak a girlfriend and I out with his pet tarantula, I gloated how cute it was. If an insect lands on me and it's not readily identifiable as a swattable mosquito or fly, I examine it first to see if it is a benign ladybug or firefly, a flickable bug of unknown species, or a menacing biting swattable thing. I was so enamoured of bugs when I was young that my parents thought I'd be an entomologist, however it was the beauty and uniqueness of the insects that fascinated me, not the science behind them, hence, artist, not entomologist. But there was something about these strange caterpillars that made me freak. They were still quite young, maybe a quarter of an inch long, had tufts of black hair on their lighter colored body. They'd twitch in unison. In fact, they seemed to do everything in unison. They were like a bug borg. Stan wanted to harvest them too, so he put them in a separate jar from the Monarchs. I suspect they're moths, but I have no clue what species. This morning we looked in the jar and there are a bunch of them all clustered together on the side of the glass. They're freaky...it's like they have no sense of independence outside of their group. They're a clique. Stan feels bad that I am not accepting of them as I am the Monarchs. I hope I don't come across as speciesist, but I sort of have a bad feeling about these things. And I don't want them to consume all of our Monarch's food--they were, after all, on the same butterfly bush as the Monarch eggs and hatchlings.

To make it easy, since this is the first of the month, this will be Bug Journal, Day One.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 9:59 AM || link it email me



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Tuesday, July 31, 2001

Computer should be here tomorrow. I'm fairly excited, but pretty calm, probably because I don't really have a place to put it, so it's not exactly like I can start using it as my main workhorse machine yet. Odd that 733 mhz used to be the top of the line...now it's the low end model. Can't ever seem to get beyond that low end price...Out of four computers including a laptop, I've spent the same exact price every time...in 1995, in 1998, in 1999 and now in 2001. Same price, all the time. With the exception of the iBook in 1999, each model has been about three times speedier than the previous model....75 mhz, 233 mhz and now 733 mhz.

System X ought to be a trip.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 6:03 PM || link it email me


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Last night I had a dream I got my computer system but the monitor was used. In fact, it was so old that something in the shape of it looked like it could've been made in the 70s. It was beige, but with a deeper surface texture than most beige components have. There were pencil marks and finger smudges all over it. It looked weird, like it was too squat, but when I pushed on the top, it popped up to full size. Weird. The screen image was not too good either...too much bluish white, not much color saturation. I decided I didn't want it and opted for a new model instead.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 7:19 AM || link it email me



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Monday, July 30, 2001

Horrible awful dream last night, nightmare actually. I dreamt that Stan told me that there was a guy who he worked with that was sodomizing him. I was in shock and asked him why this was taking place and why he was allowing it to happen. He told me that although he didn't like what was happening, he did like the guy. I was incredulous. I stared Stan straight in the eye and told him that I have never cheated on him and I started getting really mad. I also told him I wanted to beat up the guy who was doing this to him, but we were thinking of waiting and bringing a lawsuit against him first.

Too disturbing.

Actually, I know why I dreamt this...and it has nothing to do with me or Stan or sodomy but it does have to do with someone else we know who we suspect is cheating on their spouse which is a very disturbing thing in our life right now.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 8:26 AM || link it email me




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Copyright 1996-2001 Ann Stretton. All Rights Reserved. No part of this web log may be copied or reproduced, however text may be quoted if a link is given in return. Permission is not given under any circumstances to use any of the graphics or art on this site, however If you ask first, I may grant permission at my discretion. Please check the link above to my Ann-S-Thesia site for web graphics if that is what you need.