280 days of Urbpandemonium #171

Charlie and I were at Turtle Pond. I noticed a water lily leaf decorated with specks, like someone had shaken pepper over it. "Oh boy! I can get some springtails into my project," I thought. But when I got the leaf close enough to examine, the specks didn't move--springtails would have jumped all over the place.


The specks turned out to be water lily aphids Rhopalosiphum nymphaeae* which are slow and flightless. They start out living on plants in the Prunus group (cherries and plums) in the spring. Then some of the population is born with wings--these fly to water plants and live out the summer there. Later they migrate back to the fruit trees, where the eggs will overwinter.

*Club-tubed water-lily eater.

More goings on at the cottage

Jim surprised me by going belly-up for Diana Ross. This is how he usually greets Maggie, as an appeasement gesture.


Alexis looks fetching in her Jonathan Coulton t-shirt and Fiona Apple sun hat.


Fiona is shocked and honored that Jim is approaching her with his ball--he tends to bark at new people until he likes them. This is good stuff, him asking her to play with him.

Full Circlish

There’s one person’s LiveJournal that I’ve read for the past few years. It’s really two people—they’re a couple and they live in Boston and they foster pit bulls. For some reason I clung onto them five or six years ago. I don’t know how I found them, but I check in on both of them all the time. I sent the guy a book he was saying he wanted. I hoped he'd write on his blog, "A mysterious stranger sent me the book I wanted," but he never did.

That was Fiona Apple, interviewed in 2012 (and excepted in the oh no you didn't lj comm). The sad truth is that the book never arrived--I had a mailbox at a check cashing place for over 10 years, and then they stopped having mailboxes. I switched to a UPS store for a few years before I realized that I didn't make a zine anymore, and I didn't really need a special place for receiving mail from strangers. Somewhere in that span of time, the book was sent but lost in the postal void.

Fortunately, a short time later, I posted asking if anyone reading my journal was in Los Angeles, since I was going to be visiting. I got a VERY suspicious email from someone claiming to be Fiona Apple, and it caused me to wrack my brain trying to figure out who was trying to gaslight me. After a few emails back and forth, I became convinced that she was who she said she was.

Which was fortunate for me, because Fiona was exceptionally generous, providing opportunities for my father, brother, and I to be entertained at the Largo theater in Hollywood. We even got to meet Fiona backstage:



ANYway you've probably read most of this before, and what I'm trying to get around to saying is, Fiona got me the book again.



Thanks Fiona! So happy to have you in our life, and at our cottage.