Just because, part 30


I occasionally get the chance to snag a pic or two, but not a lot of time to write up anything at all about them, so I’ll present a couple of ‘Just because’ posts this week. In this case, it’s a cicada, of an unidentified species, that I found molting into final instar (reproducing adult phase) while attached to the tire of the car that I was working on. read more

Stormy season

Just a quick note, but there’s another meteor shower peaking soon, this time the Perseids, supposed to reach maximum on the nights of the 12th and 13th. I tell you this mostly to point out that, yet again, the moon is going to be too bright to make much of them, being damn near full those nights. I’m going to have to sit down and calculate how often either a) the moon has been too bright, read more

Storytime 32


This week we have something commonly called a comb jelly, but more specifically called a ctenophore (silent ‘c,’) because it’s not a jellyfish and in fact pretty far removed from such – it’s in a phylum all its own. I found one by accident in Florida one time, because they’re so completely transparent that I didn’t even spot it when I was read more

Haven’t broken that cycle yet

You know when I mentioned earlier that not a lot of things were going right? Yeah, still at it.

We’ll start with a photo outing with Mr Bugg, intended to chase birds and the sunset, though I already suspected the sunset wouldn’t be too fascinating, since the sky was completely free of clouds. We had several good passes from vultures and osprey, but for reasons unknown, the autofocus on read more

Storytime 31

Okay, this isn’t my photo, and technically it’s not even a photo, but I came across it looking for a new topic and liked the story.

Some friends of mine have adopted children, two, both from China – and that’s a long story in itself that I’m not going into right now, but suffice to say, China has (or at least had) a surfeit of girls awaiting adoption, mostly read more

July has to leaf


Okay, that was terrible, even for me, but it was still better than, “July has to fly,” which was my original choice. We are talking, of course, about the end-of-the-month abstract, something that started as a mere coincidence several years back and I’ve been continuing out of, um, something or other. If you were a professional blogger you’d understand.

Ignoring all that, this read more

At least a less dim one

It has been a couple of weeks of things just not going quite right – not particularly bad, mind you, or at least not all of them, but very, very few things working out as intended, planned, foreseen, or whatever. Even things that I took great pains to try and prevent from going south, which is frustrating to no small degree (and I feel the need to point out that, in most of these read more

Nectar and pollen and all that jazz


With the heavy rains a few days back, the flowers in the NC Botanical Garden were producing more than adequate nectar, and when the Inscrutable Mr Bugg and I visited on Thursday, the pollinators were having a field read more

Oh, give it a shot

It’s been a while since I’ve made the attempt myself, but the moon conditions at least are almost ideal now. Over the next few nights we’ll be near-peak for two different meteor showers: the Delta Aquarids and the Alpha Capricornids. All too often, the moon is too bright for good viewing, throwing excessive light across the sky (especially in humid climes like read more

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