(Edit: Not actually "yesterday" by the time I managed to finish this post - not sure of the reason, but just could NOT write words down in any sort of sensical order for loooong, despite rolling with the easier language from the getgo. Seems to be a touch better at present, though. Yey.)
The brightest point by far of the yester-sucks-on-all-fronts-day (the kind that in the morning gets up to speed by me waking up in serious all-over pains, continues into lunchtime with a malfunctioning toilet, a broken microphone/camera, the garden having been dug up by the resident mole, and another typhoon making landfall straight on Tokyo, having a five o'clock tea with a university-wide flu warning at D's workplace combined with him already having a fever, and ends up with a massive work-related fail and the resulting mood from hell) was T describing how the vegetable soup that M had made got put to great use by an albatross (cue song here!), who, passing by the open kitchen window, had proceeded to un-lid the pot and eat the whole thing. Her periodically feeding the birds scraps on the balcony might have something to do with setting up this sitcom to be fair.
I'm extremely tempted to try to become friends with the couple of crows that occasionally patrol our own balcony or make ghost-noises on the roof. So far haven't actually taken any steps towards that, though, seeing as we go through quite many plastic bags every week already, because the crows of the campus seem to gain huge satisfaction/entertainment from removing/breaking every single one of those they come across, which means that keeping the bike saddles covered from elements whist parking has become a bit of a Sisyphus struggle.
Meanwhile, there is a butterfly farm happening in our garden thanks to the efforts of one (at least, I've never seen more than one at a time, so I choose to believe that rather a clan of many, it's the same one that just really really likes our place, heh) persistent Madam, most likely of this persuation, periodically (as in several times every day) flopping around the house, each time laying some fresh eggs on our lemon trees (cue next song). Which, (the eggs, not the trees nor the song) shortly hatch into rather ugly spiky poop-like larvae. A couple of days and a bunch of leaves-turned-into-memories later those grow and morph into rather cute bright green 5cm long caterpillars that a) threaten you with biiiiig orange "horns" should you bother them and b) are able to decimate a tree in a few days. Sure, these particular trees are really young (tallest about 80cm, smallest 20cm, kept in much too restrictive pots), but still, the speed with which the munching goes - if I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't believe it possible. And, of course, the bastards have specialized and refuse to eat anything else... Yeah, it's wonderful to have butterflies around, but, but.. my poor small seed-grown treelings really can't with this... So every few days we keep having to escort the caterpillars of all sizes over the fence into the neighbor's old large citrus tree in hopes that they get themselves fed there and manage to survive until the next life stage.
The even hungrier near 10cm hawk moth caterpillar with a funky tail from last autumn at least chose an abundant weedy vine as its prey and ate half of our back fence-ful, before climbing into a pot of previously-orchid substrate, cocooning up, almost getting itself killed when I tried to empty the pot out for winter, then spending the cold months on my office desk in the relative warmth of 6-10C at night, followed by wriggling about just in time to avoid being terminated again when I went to check the pot in late spring due to the lack of any life signs up to that point, resting a few days in a box in our living room, obtaining wings, pooping on my hand and flying away. Just saw one of them a few days ago - so maybe our Hippo finally made it back home... Species-wise might have been this one? Coloration of the caterpillar on the wiki page doesn't really match, however the adult form does + the species name search does bring up more familiar pictures... But in summary, uhh, I really am absolutely terrible at recognising non-plant species. Scrap that, have gotten bad at plants too. Can recognise butterfly and ladybug eggs now, tho, guess that counts for something?
Cheers,
Hedi
