This bug shell (husk?) is clinging to the wall outside my home office. I am just not sure what kind of bug this was but we see these remains of bugs clinging to various places around the countryside. I have never seen one of these bugs alive and walking around. I have only ever seen them dead. They look fearsome huh? This picture greatly exaggerates his size. This bug is only about 1.5 inches long in real life.

Yesterday we got up at 5 am to go visit Lois. She lives at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. She is 6 foot tall and she STINKS. But she has a rabid following and even her own line of t-shirts and buttons. The reason we went to see her at 5 am is to avoid most of the crowds that are flocking to see and smell her. The museum is staying open 24 hours a day this week to give everyone the chance to see Lois, the corpse flower.

Lois is kept is a smallish room that you access on the second floor of the museum. The room is kept at high humidity and heat since she is a tropical flower. There were news crews from the local tv stations in the room with their cameras. They were giving regular updates on Lois. Toot managed to get herself into one of the broadcasts.

Wondering why this flower is such a big deal? Because there have been only 29 of the flowers ever blooming in the US. And they are an endangered flower from the rainforests. The flower only blooms every few years. It has to wiegh 30 pounds before it can bloom. The HMNS has a webcam focused on Lois so if you can't make it there in person, you can view the progress on-line: Lois Webcam and you can check out the Twitter stream for Lois on the HMNS site.

Update 7/25/2010 at 9:15 pm: here is Lois now. She did not open up fully. And now she is expiring:

People do the absolute craziest things. Here is a news story from today. Take careful note of all the substances this woman used before getting into a car and DRIVING. I am amazed that she wasn't comatose.

Someone toilet papered the tree in our front yard sometime Saturday night. The contractors who are tearing up and rebuilding the outside of our house left at around 5 on Saturday and they tell me there was no toilet paper on the tree when they left. My friend Susanne drove by to check on our house Sunday morning after church and there was the toilet papered tree.

I arrived back home from my trip Sunday night and had to chuckle at the clearly amateur toilet papering job. They even left a couple of full rolls of tp on the ground under the tree. I cannot for the life of me imagine who would tp our yard. Seems like our friends are too old for that sort of thing and Toot's friends are far too young for unsupervisied toilet papering.

I suppose it was probably just some passing teens who were bored and decided the extra rolls of tp in their backpacks could be put to a better use than the original intended purpose.

I was not chuckling the next day when I went out to check our mailbox and found birth control devices on the mailbox handle and handcream squirted on the mailbox to look like you-know-what. Obviously someone is into really juvenile tricks. But I'm going to shrug it off. No sense getting all mad about it because who should I get mad at? Instead I installed extra security cameras around the perimeter of the property, put dobermans to guard the backyard, set up laser guns to zap intruders in the front yard, and hired my own ninjas to patrol the yard every five minutes. Everything should be just fine now ;)

Today was Groundhog Day here in North America. I have always been a little skeptical of this tradition, even when I was a child. Who decided the groundhog was a good weather forecaster? Well, according to a little research I did on the ever-trusty Wikipedia, those wacky Germans who settled in Pennsylvania came up with the groundhog plan.

The roots of the custom can be traced all the way back to Pagan festivals but I suppose the Germans had to clean it up a bit for the Christians and so they renamed the Pagan holiday orignally called Imbolc and made it Candlemas in the old country. Upon settling here in the new world, they cleaned it up even more by calling it Groundhog Day.

For all you lurkers and others out there, the groundhog in the mecca of Punxsutawney (yep, I had to look up how to spell that one!), Pennsylvania saw his shadow this morning and now we will have six more weeks of winter. My mother has a groundhog living under an old log cabin on her property in northern Mississippi but he did not emerge from his burrow this morning and give her the weather forecast.

My takeaway from all this: It is February 2. Chances are extremely high that we will have more winter weather. We don't need a groundhog to tell us that. Although it is probably a fun tradition in parts of the country and gives people a perfectly valid excuse to throw a party.

So this evening we had dinner at a local Japanese steakhouse. We've been meaning to go there for awhile but it is fairly new to the area and the crowds were still rampant. We waited until the "new" wore off the place and we could get a table easily.

We sat around one of those grills and watched the chef guy toss spatulas and throw eggs as well as grill our meal. There was another family sitting around our table also. We did not know them. That is the nature of these hibachi steakhouses: they seat you where there is availability. The other family was a couple and their four children who appeared to range in age from about 5 years to 14 years old.

When we left the restaurant and settled back into our vehicle to leave, I turned to Dan and asked him if he paid much attention to the other couple. Did he notice that something about them was off?

His answer: mail order bride. That one threw me because I was thinking the same thing but wasn't sure if my instincts were right.The woman had something of an eastern European accent. The guy was straight Texan. They didn't talk much. Their children were extremely well behaved. But I got these weird vibes. Hmmm....maybe we're just imagining things. But maybe not.