Heat Wave

Such a crazy summer.  One-hundred degree days are back, predicted to last a few days before dropping to the seventies...that's a thirty-degree difference in a week.  The lassitude that come with heat leaves plenty of time for the mind to go free wheeling, and mine frequently goes "off road."  Last week I saw a tiny, half-inch, baby praying mantis, and when Clay was here, there was a full-grown male on the post by the goat pen.  I understand the migration of birds and elk, etc., but I know so little about entomology.  When certain insects are not here...where are they?  Since most of the mantises right now are babies, were the eggs laid a year ago and are just now hatching?  When we moved up here, just about this time of year, there were mantises all over the place, and I mean in the hundreds...and then they "went away."  Did they all die, or move on?  Although I see them every year, there have never been so many again.  There will be no dragon flies at all, and then one day the air will be filled with tiny helicopters.  As suddenly as they appear, one day they're gone.  Pine beetles deserve a story of their own, and I'll wait until the first real rain of the season to tell it.  Bees, flies, and mosquitoes increase in numbers at certain times of the year, but a home guard is always in residence.  One wonders.

Since I have no way of telling, Yuki is getting all the credit.  There have been three little pale-brown eggs in four days!  It would take a dozen or more of these cute little eggs to make a decent breakfast for two...they're only a little larger than a quail egg.  I'm really enjoying our evening cuddles before I tuck her into her room with Satomi and Keiko.  I suppose, like all kids, she'll outgrow the need for nightie-night hugs, but it's nice while it lasts.