Moth Porn

Mothing is hard.

My best guess at these two is that they are Rusty Virbia moths, Virbia feruginosa. But as my expert mothing friends have informed me, identifying Virbia moths to species is hard, requiring looking at the underwing. 

I just snapped a couple of shots with my phone, and otherwise didn't want to disturb them. 

So Virbia sp. it is.

Foreshadowing ...

Onward and upward to our nest destination on our New England Adventure.

I don't know, the weather looks kinda nice to me.

The Only Good Spotted Lanternfly ...

 ... is a Dead Spotted Lanternfly.

Like this one that I found on my driveway.

Although I have no idea how it got there.

My best guess, the evening prior I was at a bar, the Ark Brewery in Lumberton, for a work happy hour. (The first time I had been with my colleagues since March 2020. My car was in the shop, so the EVP of Development, who lives in Navesink, NJ, picked me up and gave me a ride.) We sat outside and as a group killed over fifty of these bugs. I was had double digit kills. So maybe ti was stuck to my shoe and fell off in the driveway?

Sadly, I spotted one on my office window, and I was not able to kill it.

And there was another on the opposite window today. And again it escaped.

This is not a good thing.

Methinks I need a fly swatter.

I have a bad feeling about this.

The Basin

In the Warming Up post, I noted that Patty finished her afternoon hike in the rain. While passing through some very scenic areas.

Including that shown here, an place known as The Basin.

Just a short walk from the trail head parking lot, and the last spot we visited before heading off to the Presidential Range.

Given the temps it looked very inviting.

And a bit different from the streams in our locale, with an all rock stream bed. No sand or dirt as we have.

Black Racer

Yet another snake has made an appearance outside my office window.

A Northern Black Racer.

An occasional visitor to the yard, and not one I spot often. So it was very cool to see one.

If I have to work, and I am dependently wealthy, I'm so happy I get to work form home and see things like this. If I was at the office office, I'd look out at a parking lot from four stories up.

The Return of Snappy

Back in March I blogged about about Snappy and how I moved him/her from the fish pond to the back pond.

It seems the fish pond is preferred.

I was at my desk and spotted something, a Common Snapping Turtle, out my window. Alas it was gone before I could grab a camera.

I didn't see it for several days, despite sitting out on the deck looking for it.

And then I saw it from my desk again, and snapped a few at best blog worthy images, like the one above.

I saw the turtle again this evening.

Long term, it is probably not a good idea to have a snapping turtle living in our fish pond, however cool it is to have another critter sharing our space. Now we just need to figure out how to capture and relocate it.

Anyone out there want a snapping turtle?

Frist World Problems

In the Almost Back post I discussed my travails with electronic versus lightning.

One problem I had was that for reasons that are still not clear, Apple thought my computer wasn't my computer, and that it was actually owned by a company, in that there was MDM (Mobile Device Management) software installed on it. 

Now why there would be Mobile Device Management software on a desktop computer never seemed to cross the mind of the 'genius' at the Apple store, they told me I needed to provide proof, such as a receipt, that the computer was mine.

There were several problems with this.

First, the receipt was on the hard drive of the computer that I did not have. Second, Apple keeps eighteen months of purchase history online and available to customers; I bought this computer nineteen months prior to the incident. Third, I had no connectivity at my place to contact Apple support (recall my modem and router were also fried) and thus to contact them I needed to venture out to where a signal could be had.

So I did. And while I was on the phone with an Apple support rep, one who tried very hard to be helpful, for over an hour (!!!) I was getting more and more frustrated at this whole Catch-22 situation, this appeared in the sky out my car windshield.

And while on hold for the n-teenth time I snapped this image. And calmed down a bit.

Eventually the rep told me that she was unable to get a receipt, but that she had ordered one on my behalf from somewhere else inside Apple, and cautions that it might take several days to arrive (It arrived that evening). 

And it turned out I didn't need it anyway. Some other 'genius' at the Apple store (a super genius perhaps?) figured out that the MDM issue was all a mistake. 

All that stress and frustration for nothing. 

I really needed that vacation ...