One last notice before I declare it over on FB…if you want them, you have first dibs.
Meanwhile, spring is springing here, at last: the tree peonies are just about to spread their leaves, the apple tree has sprigs, buds on the cherry trees are about to go, and I expect the dogwood and magnolia to be ready soon. Rhododendron is budded, azalea is getting there, and the warming of the water has brought all our koi up alive and well. We didn’t lose anybody in the winter, and Ari’s wound is much better. The pond, which I treated, is only half clear, but there are increasing bubbles, which indicates the bacterial additive is starting to work, and the water is getting clearer day by day.
I found a curious fellow in the filter yesterday, and did a little deep brain-search before I recognized him as a large dragonfly nymph. They’re dangerous to small fish, but fine with big ones, and I put him back in: curious that Mrs. Hoyt’s 5th grade class’s assignment of drawing and coloring the life cycle of a dragonfly should come back at such distance.
The name of our little garden is Tan Bo Mon, which is ‘Dragonfly Gate.’ And it is. We see quite a lot of them in the summer. Happy they’ve called us ‘home!’
Ah – I was too slow to pick up one of the copies of Protector! I did get the ebook version, though, and am eagerly awaiting having some free time this coming week to read it thoroughly. I couldn’t resist, and skimmed parts of it already, just so that I could get to sleep at a somewhat reasonable hour.
The dragonfly nymph in your filter reminded me of an event that happens every year, but I’ve seen it only once. We were camping by a deep, calm pool of a large stream in northern Pennsylvania in May, and the weather was calm, warmish, and sunny. Dragonfly nymphs emerged from the water in wave after wave, split their exoskeletons, and the adults squeezed out. The wings were wet and crumpled, but gradually straightened as each dragonfly pumped them (to encourage the hemolymph to circulate, I suppose). Once the wings were fully extended, each dragonfly would wait for a few more minutes, until everything was dry and the new exoskeleton had hardened. You could see the wings and body start to glisten as they reflected the sunlight. Then it would leap into the air and zoom off.
This went on for hours, and the stream bank was covered with the empty husks, much like the piles of discarded exoskeletons when the cicadas emerge. As soon as one adult flew off, another nymph would take its place, it seemed.
Perhaps because our presence interfered, we saw almost no predators come to feast on the young dragonflies. A few flycatchers, but that was all. So, I think most of that cohort lived at least until sunset.
One year my sister cam home from a weekend with friends with a gallon jar that (among other critters) had a damselfly nymph. It was interesting to watch, and one day it came out of the water, shed its nymph-skeleton, and turned into a black-and-turquoise damselfly.
I ordered the paperback of Intruder yesterday from Closed Circle, glad to get it direct from the source. I very much enjoyed the first reading of Protector this weekend: the ebook is available from Kobo for rest-of-the-world countries like Holland. If the commenter from New Zealand can’t see it yet, does that mean that New Zealand and Australia are part of the UK rights, or are they a separate region in themselves?
I’ll reread it next weekend to absorb more of the details. It’s wonderful how you can manage to combine the thoughtfulness and interpersonal or psychological developments with the breathless rush of action! I have to wait for a weekend to start reading, as it quite drags me along in the exitement of the first read-through, I can never bear to put it down in that first rush. I loved it! The next read-through will give me more leasure to savour the details of all these interesting developments.
There, that’s spoiler-free while hopefully showing a bit of my enthousiasm for this very good addition to the series.
I just had this incredibly selfish thought: it’s good to know Peacemaker is almost ready for submission, so it’s sure to come out next year, even if you need to take a short hiatus to take care of your eye. All fannish ‘I want more’ sorts of thoughts aside, please be very careful with your eye, and do take a break if you need one. You’ve been going almost non-stop for as long as I’ve been following this blog, and that’s been quite a few years! And is Jane allright, or does she need to get her eyes seen as well, if they still hurt? What was in that rain to cause this, acid and soot/dust from emissions that accumulated in the dry period, or wasn’t the USA bothered by that?
Here in Holland it’s been the coldest and driest March since 1951 or thereabouts – we still had night frosts last weekend, snow at the start of April, and daytemperatures just above freezing with a very cold and hard (and dry) northeasterly wind – from the north pole via Siberia, it seems. We’re in a temperate zone, on the coast (warmed by the Gulf stream), it’s never this consistently cold this late in the year.
Normally a lot of bushes and trees are starting to leaf out or are in full flower by now, but this year all the buds on the branches are staying very tight; the little Tête-à-tête yellow daffodils are only just starting to bloom and the larger are still just green spears just above the ground. The crocusses have come into flower, but keep their flowers shut like upside-down raindrops because of the cold. Everything in the garden is at least three weeks later than normal.
The weatherpeople say it’ll start to warm up a bit by the end of the week – but even before that gets underway the rains are expected to start. Spring here is usually wet, interspersed with some sunny days – now we’ve had a lot of dry days that were extremely cold, I hope the rest of spring won’t stay extra wet just when the temperature gets up to where we might go outside without mittens and a muffler – neither extreme makes me want to go and do something about the garden. As last autumn had a lot of bad weather on the weekends I didn’t do much then either. The old debris is much appreciated by the birds, but I do need to clear some stuff out before the spring growth starts to take off in a rush, once the rain and warmer temperatures start.
In Oz we only have 8 of CJs books in ebook form. The rest are only available as audio books. 🙁