Friday, July 29, 2005

Little Brown bat



At least, I THINK it's a Little Brown bat. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong! I mean, obviously it's little and brown, but is it the "Little Brown" variety? Seems most likely, given their distribution.

Bats have moved into our bathouse (HOORAY!) but this little guy (girl?) has slept on our porch wall a couple of times this past week. Not sure why... maybe he is being shunned by the colony? Maybe he wants to start a new colony on our front porch? (Not bloody likely!) This was shot looking up the wall to where it meets the sloped porch roof. Barney the bat ("Barnella" if it's a gurl) was at least ten feet off the ground. The new zoom camera lens we have is so heavy that I could barely hold the camera still, so forgive me if it's not perfectly in focus.

The little dark blob to the right of his front... paw (?) is a bat turd, aka guano. It's amazing how much guano one Little Brown bat creates in a day! Proportionately, it is far more than I produce in a day. Not that I produce bat guano... nevermind. I had to sweep a pile o'guano off the porch yesterday. I'm hoping it's good fertilizer for the flower bed it fell on.

Does anyone read this stuff? Does anybody care? Is that a song? Maybe I need to spice things up, make Knatolee's World grittier, more disturbing: "And then the bat dropped down and plucked out my eyeball and flew away with it, like some giant, squishy June bug!" Something like that.

Yarn Hos



Ah, me and my American friend Phyllis, she of the knitted womb and Dairyland Wisconsin! She knit her lovely variegated blue/purple sweater, and she gave me the "Yarn ho" shirt. Unfortunately, in this picture it looks like "Urn ho", which might make you think I'm some sort of necrophiliac. Most definitely I am not; my love is for all things woolly. I'm a (rug) hooker and a yarn ho. Phyllis prefers to call herself a yarn slut. I just call her a tart. I love her because she tolerates me using her skull as an arm rest. :)