In August of 2013 Lyssa and I spotted a most unusual thing on our way up to the front door after grocery shopping, a cicada hawk, which is a wasp that hunts cicadas. This particular speciment could have perched proudly in the palm of my hand and easily stretched from one side to the other.
Here are the pictures.
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Somehow, this directory of pictures slipped through. I took a few pictures at the Dead Can Dance concert in Maryland back in the summer of 2012. Here they are.
(TODO: Yes, I know the link to the gallery is broken; I need to reinstall the gallery HTML in that directory.)
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I haven't seen this get a whole lot of love recently, so I thought I'd boost the signal in some small way.
On Sunday, 29 September 2013 between 1200 and 1700 EST5EDT there will be a Mini Maker Faire in Silver Spring, Maryland. If you've never heard of Maker Faire, it's a series of events organized and thrown by Make Magazine that are collectively billed as the Greatest Show-and-Tell on Earth. At a Maker Faire you can see everything from 3d printing demonstrations to singing Tesla coils, combat robots to kite photography, and everything in between. Mini-Maker Faires are, as …
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This is probably one of the hardest blog posts I've ever tried to write. It's hard to write something like this so that it's not all drama, not all pathos, not all "holiday tragedy human interest story" (which is its own unique flavour of article, to be sure), and yet not come across like I'm trying to manipulate people by tugging at their heart strings. So, to that end, I've opted to write only the facts as I understand them, with a minimum of linguistic ornamentation.
Mylia, Chey, Mika, and Cindy are old friends of the family, and rented a …
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I'm boosting the signal for Eria Owens Yeager - this is important:
Quoting from her blog:
IMPORTANT.
Katie has run away; she left from school yesterday (Thursday). We believe that she has gone to Williamsburg VA or Richmond VA, to be with a young man named Donovan Bullock. (An earlier attempt to run to him was thwarted on Tuesday of this week.) Police in Silver Spring MD and in Williamsburg have been notified, and there is a national missing persons report for her.
If you can help, please contact the authorities. Katie sometimes goes by the name "Howell." She is around …
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Possibly the second worst thing about pulling up roots and moving someplace new is all the paperwork: You can only accomplish so much until you brave the outermost ring of Hell and return with proof of your valor. To put it another way, until the Department of Motor Vehicles deigns to give you a new driver's license, implicitly stating that you've been accepted by the state as being a full resident you'll probably be stuck. This usually involves a two step process, the first being the acquisition of a title, or legal proof that you are the lawful owner of …
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As a few offhand comments made in earlier posts (and no small amount of bitching on Twitter) alluded to, Lyssa and I have largely finished the task of relocating to a house in a small-ish neighborhood a stone's throw from downtown Washington, DC. We're not quite in the Sprawl anymore but you can definitely see signs of its encroachment if you walk a few blocks.
We'd lived for nearly six years in our apartment, a two-and-a-half bedroom deal that started to get pretty crowded a few years in (largely due to the fifteen bookcases split between Lyssa and I, but …
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As you may or may not have heard on the interwebbytubes, the DC metroplex was rocked by an earthquake that measured 5.8 on the Richter scale this afternoon and was felt as far away as Ontario, Canada. Various and sundry other locales reported the quake as well, from Pittsburgh, PA to Tampa, FL, to Brooklyn and New York, NY. An aftershock measuring 2.8 on the Richter scale was reported a little while later (I don't know how long). This is the second to hit the area in the last couple of years; the quake that occurred in July …
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