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Today has been almost humid, almost warm. I knew it would be before the sun even rose, because I woke around 4 a.m., hot and uncomfortable, a pretty good sign that the air pressure is dropping and the weather is about to change.
We've had the kind of cloudscape you don't get in winter: piles of cumulus and a variety of other types, all milling about the sky together, changing themselves up every half hour.
And the insects! My office building is an 8-story concrete eyesore with outdoor walkways on every floor. There are three ways to get to higher floors, and only one of them will keep you dry on a rainy day: a set of stairs, a system of ramps, and the elevator. Every fall at some point, the building becomes a gathering place for hordes of ladybugs, which I assume are getting ready to hibernate. It's possible they find some nice cracks and holes in our building and use them as cozy winter digs.
So the walls and columns on the lower floors were crawling with little red beetles. Because the sky was so beautiful and the trees around campus so vivid, I decided to take my exercise by climbing the stairs. (It's an outdoor activity!) By the time I got to the seventh floor, then the eighth, there were fewer ladybugs and a lot more wasps. Swarms of graceful black wasps hovering around the southeast corer of the building, zooming in to land, zooming out to fly some more. I could see dozens of their silhouettes against the blue and white and gray of the sky. Languid. That's wasps in November.
I like walking among wasps. Not because I'm comfortable with them, though I am as much as it's possible, I guess, but because there's a little bit of danger. I know they don't care about me; they just want to go on with their business, and whatever that is must be pretty serious, this close to winter. They don't want to hurt me, but they can. And they are careful, and they will. If I do something wrong--trip over my feet and go flying, or shout and wave my arms, or worst of all panic, they may understandably be moved to defense. But I'm careful too, and I trust them enough to walk among them, and they trust me enough to ignore me. They're beautiful creatures, I know I've said it before.
We've had the kind of cloudscape you don't get in winter: piles of cumulus and a variety of other types, all milling about the sky together, changing themselves up every half hour.
And the insects! My office building is an 8-story concrete eyesore with outdoor walkways on every floor. There are three ways to get to higher floors, and only one of them will keep you dry on a rainy day: a set of stairs, a system of ramps, and the elevator. Every fall at some point, the building becomes a gathering place for hordes of ladybugs, which I assume are getting ready to hibernate. It's possible they find some nice cracks and holes in our building and use them as cozy winter digs.
So the walls and columns on the lower floors were crawling with little red beetles. Because the sky was so beautiful and the trees around campus so vivid, I decided to take my exercise by climbing the stairs. (It's an outdoor activity!) By the time I got to the seventh floor, then the eighth, there were fewer ladybugs and a lot more wasps. Swarms of graceful black wasps hovering around the southeast corer of the building, zooming in to land, zooming out to fly some more. I could see dozens of their silhouettes against the blue and white and gray of the sky. Languid. That's wasps in November.
I like walking among wasps. Not because I'm comfortable with them, though I am as much as it's possible, I guess, but because there's a little bit of danger. I know they don't care about me; they just want to go on with their business, and whatever that is must be pretty serious, this close to winter. They don't want to hurt me, but they can. And they are careful, and they will. If I do something wrong--trip over my feet and go flying, or shout and wave my arms, or worst of all panic, they may understandably be moved to defense. But I'm careful too, and I trust them enough to walk among them, and they trust me enough to ignore me. They're beautiful creatures, I know I've said it before.