Tiny green aliens

I had a very constructive day yesterday. After finishing as much of my patchwork project as I was able to, I took advantage of the fact that the sewing machine was out to patch a couple of favourite pairs of jeans. One pair had just a small hole, so I was able to patch it almost invisibly with a patch on the inside, but the other pair had a large tear that I wasn’t able to hide. So I decided to go to the other extreme, and cut up a few old pairs that were of different coloured denim (and were totally beyond repair so had migrated to the rag bag), and in addition to sewing one patch over the rip, I added multi-coloured patches all over the place. So I’ve now got a very colourful pair of jeans that will hopefully be servicable for another year or two.

Then once that job was done I packed my books for Dunedin. All I can say is I’m glad there’s two cars travelling down together, because I don’t think all my books will fit in one car… Actually, it’s not that bad – I packed 100 books (!!!), but most of them are thin ones, so I’ve only filled my Bookcrossing tote bag plus two supermarket bags (and one of those bags is books I want to release on the way down). Now I just need to squeeze a change of clothes and my toothbrush in somewhere, and I’m all set! 🙂

And in the evening I actually got some study done! I’ve suddenly realised that I’ve only got a week left until my Spanish course starts again, and last year’s tutor warned us that the second year course throws you straight in at the deep end, so she reccommended that we do some study before term started again. Of course, I have been keeping up a bit with my Spanish over the summer, watching DVDs with Spanish soundtracks and attempting to read a book of short stories (I’m still struggling through it – only three more stories to go!), but I haven’t really done any grammar or anything. And although I’ve technically got a week to go, in reality it’s only a few evenings – I’ll be much too busy at work this week to sneak in any study time, I’ll probably be working late on Wednesday night, there’s a Bookcrossing meetup on Thursday night, and of course the NZBC Convention at the weekend. In fact, why am I writing this – I should be studying! Oh well, I got a good start on it last night, and was pleased to see that it all came back to me pretty quickly, so a couple more evening’s work should be enough to get me back up to speed for next Monday.

It was a very hot and muggy day yesterday, so we had all the doors and windows open until we went to bed, which brought all sorts of interesting insect visitors into the house. One was something I’ve never seen before: what looked like a tiny green weta. We get little bush wetas in the house quite often (not the huge cave wetas though!), but they’re normally brown – I’ve never seen a green one before. Of course, it’s probably an incredibly common insect that I’ve just never noticed (or maybe all wetas start off green and go brown when they get bigger), but I still thought it was interesting enough to try taking some pictures:

Its body was only about 5 mm long, so it’s pretty tiny.

There was an exciting parcel waiting for me when I got home tonight: a copy of Milk Treading by Nick Smith which DianaCoats had sent me as a RABK, plus three little furry mice toys for the cats (which the accompanying note said her cat had insisted she send :-)). Surprisingly, Ming, who normally ignores toys, has totally taken to them and was last seen batting them behind the sofa with a mad look in his eyes.