How Many Words?

Oops, almost forgot to write The Blog today...

I am participating in NaNoWriMo this month - National Novel Writing Month. The premise of NaNoWriMo is that you write a 50,000 word novel during the 30 day-long month of November. If you do, you win! What do you win? Nothing, really, just the satisfaction of having done it. This is my eighth year participating, and I'll be honest, I find it to be pretty easy to write 50,000 words in a month. It's a challenge for a lot of people, but I have never found it to be all that hard. I usually get to 50,000 in less than two weeks. I almost always end up with over 100,000 words. But before this year I wasn't writing a blog, too. This year November came along and I was not only a wanna-be novelist, I was also a blogger. And this blog can take up to five hours of my day, when you include the search for the bugs that I feature on it. And I have never cheated and used pictures from a different day. Every day there's a blog, those bugs on the blog were photographed in my backyard that day. So NaNoWriMo was a bit more taxing on me this year, because I had this other writing to do. Granted, the blog is not taking five hours a day anymore. It's usually less than two, and sometimes less than one. And a couple of nights when it was one of those longer blog nights, I worked on the novel while pictures were loading - upload a picture, write a hundred words. Picture done? Upload another, write another hundred words. But when I started out the month, I figured, "Hey, this isn't going to be a problem, doing the blog AND NaNoWriMo, because the blog will be done in about a week! It's getting cold, there won't be anymore bugs!" And it did get cold. Freezing, in fact. Bugs can't survive in freezing weather, right? No way I would STILL be writing the blog every day by the end of November, right? NO WAY I would still be finding living bugs in the backyard by the 29th of November!

Because SUMMER IS OVER!

Well, you're not going to believe this. I don't believe it myself. I went outside today, where it was 32ºF - LITERALLY FREEZING, and not three steps out the door I found a spider - alive - on the side of the house. And when I leaned down to take a picture of the spider, I found this:

This, by the way, was not even the sunny side of the house. So this bug wasn't even basking in the sunshine (actually, come to think of it, it was beginning to cloud over by the time I went outside).

Then, a little while later, I found this:

Also not on the sunny side.

I also found this, which is more what I would expect to find when everything is supposed to have hunkered down for the long freeze:

Some sort of cocoon. In about five months or so maybe a moth will emerge.

It was a mind-boggling day in the backyard.

This is the time of year when you really start to see the things that were hidden in the summer, specifically birds' nests. But it's also the point when, in the last couple of years, I have spotted praying mantis egg cases. This year, though, I have not found any. So I guess I won't get to see the hatching of the baby mantises next spring.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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This could be the same crab spider that I saw a couple of days ago; it was in just about the same spot. But I know it's alive and didn't just die there and get stuck somehow, because it wasn't there yesterday.

Speaking of which, Rain Gauge Spider is still there, today she was huddled quite deep in her little alcove.