Rick has more patience than I do. Right now, he's watching a monarch larva attempt to climb to the top of a cage in preparation for its pupation. This larva is not the pointiest leaf in the milkweed patch, if you get my drift. Rick has provided it with sticks (our other caterpillar, which is spinning its silk button now, did not need any in order to find the top of the cage), but larva #2 keeps getting partway up and then coming back down. I'm now wondering if, when this one emerges from its chrysalis, it will attempt to fly backwards.

Missed a chance to blog on my birthday (2 September) because I spent it (a) preparing to teach two sections of introductory biology involving well over 400 students, (b) actually teaching two sections of introductory biology to well over 400 students, (c) going out for a quick beer with several friends, (d) attending a lecture on endocrine disruptors, (e) going out for an extremely late dinner with Rick, and (f) getting home just in time to find that my blog host was down. So, yeah, I did have a birthday. Got not only the ant tome I mentioned last week, but some new clothes, a neat package of everything from kitchen gadgets to entomological candy, and a cable upgrade.

The cable upgrade really is just frosting, because we only upgraded our service in order to have faster Internet connections. However, we got not only BBC America (which I haven't had any time to watch yet) out of the deal, but about twenty music-only channels. One of them is all New Wave, all the time. Y'know, there's another entry there somewhere, but it'll have to wait; I'm pretty worn out from this week, which has contained more 11-to-14 hour days than I can recall working in a long time. There are deadlines ahead. If they're not met, someone or something will fall off the edge of the earth and be eaten by dragons.