Gloom and the Bright Side

I hate picking up my newspaper when the bag is wet, particularly because the delivery person tends to dump it in the dirt, so wet equals muddy. But last week I realized that there is something worse than a wet newspaper bag, and that is a bag covered in frass, because that's just gross. Today I found out that there is something FAR worse than either of those things, and it is a wet bag covered in frass.

I am not even going to describe to you WHY. You don't want to know, and I hope you never have to find out.

Between the constant gloom and the fact that the accompanying rain isn't doing ANYTHING to kill the GMCs in my backyard I am pretty depressed at the moment. However, I had a successful bug walk today (meaning, I found bugs and it almost didn't rain at all), so... yay.

For the second day in a row I found something that is increasingly rare–a new-to-me bug for Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Some kind of leaf hopper that I have never seen before.

I haven't seen many butterflies lately, which I am attributing to the hideous weather and the lack of a lot of variety of things blooming in my backyard at the moment, but today I did find a skipper:

 Butterflies are hard to photograph because they don't like to sit still for long, but this skipper was completely still for me. And most extraordinary is that I was outside for about an hour, this was the first insect that I saw, and an hour later it was still sitting on the exact same leaf.

 Fly

 Looper caterpillar

 Assassin bug. I wish these would assassinate the GMCs.

 Another hopper

 Katydid nymph

When I took this picture of an only slightly open flower I didn't even notice that I was taking pictures of insects...

 Squash bug

 Sometimes I am literally so focused on one thing that I don't notice what else is right in front of me. Case in point: I took this picture of the hoverfly, and didn't even notice the other bug until I looked at the picture on the computer. Ironically, the other bug is in better focus in this shot.

 Better shot of the hoverfly

Long-legged fly

 It is partly procrastination that makes me write my blog posts late at night, at the last minute, but partly also knowing that if I write my blog in the afternoon I might find other bugs later that I could have put in it. For example, this caddisfly that I found on the back porch late in the evening.

Mom, stop reading now. Or scroll really fast down to the spiders if you want to see them, but just don't look at the next two pictures.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

 GMC on my window

 Hideous face

Arachnid Appreciation:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

 I think this is a mite. It was tiny, and running around really fast, so I didn't get a clear picture or a good look.

 An excellent illustration of sexual dimorphism. I assume the male is the small one on the left, and the female is the larger one on the right. From what I have read about spiders and the relationships between male and female, it's interesting that they are hanging out together on this web, so close.

 Crab spider

 Six-spotted orb weaver

Jumping Spider