Saddleback Caterpillar - Look but Don't Touch

Look at this cutie pie - like a little brown dog wearing a sweater knitted by someone whose team colors are lime green and brown.

We found one in the trail this morning, and moved it off to one side. Back home, I found that it is venomous, and not uncommon in the eastern US.

Venomous caterpillars don't inject their poison like wasps, they just have little spines that carry it and break off in the skin of those who bother them.

Since venomous insects often boast garish colors to warn away predators, the football sweater should have tipped us off.

Serenity from eBay

Things - they can stick to you like burrs. Gradually the accumulation starts weighing you down. Books, hobby supplies, knickknacks, and just STUFF. It's not that it's bad, it's just not used

• in the last five years
• in the last ten years
• ever, and it is still in the box
  

eBay and Amazon to the rescue. You can see whether your item has value in the marketplace. You can determine whether you could replace it if you decide you need it in the future (usually the answer is yes). And you can photograph, post, and part with it with surprisingly little trouble. For money.

Result: leaner house, fatter bank account.

I am going through the things that don't add value to our lives now, and they are heading out to new owners. Since we are readers, many of them are books. Sometimes I come across one with a note on the flyleaf like, 'Love on your birthday! 1978.' I smile, and add it to the keepers.

The Complexity of Caterpillars

Yesterday in Kanawha State Forest we came across a large (about the size of my little finger), smooth, bright green caterpillar. When we got home I looked in 'Field Guide to the Insects' for it. Nope - no pictures of caterpillars.

So I tried on the web, and found the Discover Life Caterpillar page, where I determined that our caterpillar was the larva of either an Oval Base Prominent or White Dot Prominent moth. The Caterpillar page allows you to check off characteristics (main body color, main pattern, hair, etc.) to narrow your search.

Go - find a caterpillar, check the web site.

Tomato Love

A gem from the farmers' market. It's large, lumpy, and very tasty. This is a yellow brandywine, an heirloom.

In case you're not familiar with heirloom vegetables, they are the old, open-pollinated varieties, as opposed to modern hybrids.

Seed companies develop hybrids to have regular, pretty shapes, and to stand up to shipping. Heirlooms were bred by generations of growers selecting for hardiness and flavor.

Farmers Market - Outside the Box

This morning we made a fast trip to Charleston's farmers' market. We came home with heirloom tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, peaches, several varieties of squash, beets, apples, peppers, and ....Chinese eggplant.

Think ' West Virginia farm', and Chinese eggplant is not the first thing to pop into your mind. These are tender little beauties. I love it that farmers are growing a variety of vegetables, not just the old favorites.

One of the heirloom tomatoes was devoured as soon as we got home, and it reminded me of my mother's garden years ago.

Sagas of the Royal Navy

Two of my favorite authors, C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian, each wrote a series of historic novels set in the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars.

My fondness for Forester can be explained by the jacket blurb on Hornblower and the Hotspur: "In storm, in flame, in blood, and in love, the plot unfolds." To be accurate, there's not a lot of mushy stuff going on in books by either author - their hearts lie in the storm, flame, and blood.

The New York Times reviewer described O'Brian's books as "The best historical novels ever written." To which I add that he could write complex sentences with semi-colons without a reader even noticing. That's a feat.

Strange Fruits, Part One - The Papaya

Down at the super Wal-Mart, not generally the home of the exotic, I spied a 2-lb., lumpy fruit. It was unappealing, rather like a fat, homely zucchini. So I bought it.

After it had a couple of days to ripen, I cut it and scraped out the black seeds. The flesh is soft and smooth, and tastes somewhat like coffee with cream. Papayas are chock full of nutrients and low in calories. Their rich flavor gives a pleasant feeling of indulgence.

Raw papaya is good by itself or in salads. I also tried a green papaya roasted like a butternut squash. My experimental subjects (family members) liked it, after being unenthusiastic about the ripe fruit.

The Heavy Ten Pounds

After lugging the 10 lb. dumbbell around in a day pack, losing ten pounds just seems like the sane thing to do.

And carrying around a dumbbell in a pack seems, well, not so sane. It feels wonderful to put it down.

What's the flower?

This spring I was given a paper cup containing a few nasturtium seeds - a plant I haven't seen much since I was a child, when we had a skimpy border of little plants. I stuck the seeds in the ground without expecting much.

They are striking. The flowers are hot, tropical orange. The foliage looks like lily pads, floating gracefully. The plants are spreading beauties - and if they spread too much, they're good in salads. A new garden favorite.

Teaberry Rock in Deep Time

This morning we hiked a loop up ("up" meaning almost literally up, typical of West Virginia) Alligator Rock trail and down Teaberry Rock trail in Kanawha State Forest.

Teaberry Rock is a pleasant outcropping with a view across a narrow forested valley, a good place to sit for a rest for a few minutes to enjoy the view.

The rock itself is sandstone, which predominates in the area, but with a twist. Generally, sandstone is pretty dull - mud turned into rock. It was laid down millions of years ago as the sediment of strange seas, and has moved with the earth's crust, eventually buckling to form the Appalachian Mountains, one of the oldest ranges in the world.

Teaberry Rock is sandstone, but it contains many small, smooth, oval pebbles of quartz, about the size of large beans. This means that our ancient sandstone contains rocks which in turn are are so much older that they had time to erode into little pebbles before they were incorporated in the sediment.

In mid-August, the forest is beginning to show the approach of fall - goldenrod is budding, mushrooms are everywhere, and the robins are beginning to flock. In some ways it seems that nature is always in a hurry - in some ways it is slow beyond the mind's ability to grasp.