So, this is kinda cool

This picture was taken in my yard about 5 minutes ago, the thing is actually slightly larger than a quarter.Many of you will probably knit your brows or possibly roll your eyes, but to me this is pretty darn sweet. . .

We always get a living tree at Christmas (with root ball) and plant it outside after Christmas. We started doing this in 1998 shortly after we had purchased this lot (where we now live). Our 1998 tree died due to our lack of evergreen tree knowledge, but we've gotten more knowledgeable, and trees 1999-2005 are lookin' good. (Nice because we have each of our childrens' first trees out there). Anyway, my husband bought the tree and noticed this brown cacoon-like thing on one of it's branches. He showed it to me. We decided to leave it alone because it didn't look like it could possibly contain spiders.

So he planted the tree outside with the help of a buddy or two. One of the guys said it is full of baby praying mantis. That's fine, but this guy ordinarily cannot be counted on to know too much (at least about nature). Anyway I have to eat crow, he was exactly right. I just finally got around to looking it up on the Internet, and ours looks just like the examples I found. this is called an ootheca, it contains anywhere from 50-400 immature mantis. Cool!! I only hope that the warm temps for ten days in my house didn't somehow disturb their lifecycle.

Not only are the praying mantis one of the most awesome looking insects around, but they are helpful. They don't eat our garden, they eat the bugs that do! Cool. While some would be tempted to bring it indoors prior to hatching, we will just let it be and hope that nothing eats it before our mantis nymphs make their way out. The thought of 400 praying mantis in my house is more than a little unnerving.

I had a very nice evening yesterday. We rented Chicken Run and watched it together with buttery popcorn. The kids had a ball and my husband and I enjoyed the movie as well. Today has been a day of trying to catch up. I made three clothing repairs, did the vacuuming and the laundry will be an ongoing chore for the next few hours. But right now it is so quiet in here, it's really nice. That practically never happens. The dogs are napping as are the kids and hubby is working in the 'shop' which is how he would like to refer to the pole-barn hence forth. I also rented a movie called the Interpreter with Nicole Kidman and, hmmm gotta check the box... Oh well neither the box (Iggle video) nor the disk have the names, oh yeah Sean Penn. So hopefully we will watch that before this Friday. Chicken Run was great, but I love Wallace and Grommit so I fully expected to love this film as well.

I noticed that I have some Asia hits and I am wondering if the word Geisha brought them here somehow. Made me wonder what would happen if I threw out the word Brothel. So let's keep an eye on that map ;-)

Tomorrow promises to be a long day, doubtful I will be blogging. Now, off to see what You are blogging about.