for followers of the pede saga...

...here are some photos of a little guy i just found crawling on the wall of my laundry room. he is special because he is the first of the pedes in the house who i've seen moving on a vertical surface (and also the first pede of the day... none sunday afternoon or evening). the dark shape just near him is half a spinach leaf, which I'd just put in the jar in the hopes that he would find it a tasty snack (he's uninterested). I can't take him outside to release him because I am the only one awake, and it's still dark out, so I was trying to give him some food to tide him over. I don't think I will still be awake when it's light out, so unfortunately (for him) I think this little guy is doomed.

(updated 6:18 AM: When I took him back into the laundry room in his jar, I found another. Added it to the jar. Left the room for something, wandered back, and saw two more sneaking in. Added them to the jar. Watched them for a while. They are really odd little creatures. They crawl all over each other, sometimes "deferring" to each other when they meet head-on... the one who is being crawled on or who is letting another pass will lower his little antennae and curl them under to protect them from injury and also I suppose so that he will not "taste" the passerby!

anyway, I saw where they are coming in, in that part of the house... a small area in the bottom corners of the kitchen door. I woke my mom up to show her and to tell her that I'd caught 4 in under 10 minutes, one at a time. She watched at the door where I took them outside. I just feel bad about killing them when they are so easy to catch.)

(Note: the pics are only of the first one I caught.)

( pede pics. HE's not gross! he's LITTLE and LEGGY! shown slightly larger than actual size. )

(no subject)

just threw out ANOTHER jar of pedes. 5 of them. 3 caught in the front of the house about equidistant from the front door (in the livingroom and my actual bedroom), and two caught in the garage on their way in to plague me!

called the new exterminator my mom hired (who said they'd come "sometime this week") to stress the urgency of their presence.

(no subject)

I got up a while before the exterminator came early this afternoon. He turned out to be a nice man probably around 40 years old. He sprayed around the house and outside. It turns out that the pedes are just migrating... some people are getting them in their swimming pools by the hundreds, and the pool pumps are getting clogged and so on. They are also the least of our problems at this house... there are a lot of anthills (which have been baited), but more scarily, there is a huge infestation of black widow spiders in the backyard (where we never go). They, too, have been sprayed. I've never even SEEN a black widow before and it turns out my whole patio area is full of them! I may go collect some corpses for the purposes of scientific inquiry. We'll see.

After that it was rush rush to the art store to buy matting supplies. Along with the matting supplies, I got a cheap easel ($10) and a lot of specialty handmade papers. Some are marbellized, some are made of different layers in different colors, some are lace paper, some are silkscreened. Very interesting stuff. I like book arts so it will be good for that.

Then I went to class and drew for three hours. We actually (finally) had a male model tonight. I've never drawn from a male model; they are proportionally different. And this one was fairly young and attractive (ah, the glories of Hellas!)... but he had a distracting erection. My friend in class noticed it too. We were both trying to ignore it and didn't draw that area of his body, but giggled about it for a moment when we were by ourselves in the hall. Our models are "figleafed" - they always wear underpants - so it was about as discreet as could be. As for what I did draw: I tackled hands tonight, and didn't do too badly for a first try (I'm really scared of drawing hands - they're hard). Man hands. Hahaha.

Now I have a lot of work to do. Blah - midterm week is no fun!