Unfinished business: Episcia-eating caterpillars

I am pleased to report that there has been a breakthrough in the whole camera-uploading-photos-to-dumb-locations business. The overall situation is still not great, alas, but that much has been settled, and this gives us hope for the future. Except where it comes to the scale-and-caterpillar part of the future, because my optimism has limits.

I do, at least, now have pictures of one of the caterpillars. (Not sure how many there were total, but it was in the neighborhood of ten.)

I'm getting used to a new monitor, so I'm not sure what kind of color fidelity I'm going to end up with -- how do people use LCD monitors? If you sit up slightly straighter, the whole screen changes color. Am I just going to have to get used to sitting very still? -- but you can surely get the general idea from this; it's not like my color fidelity has ever been very good in the first place.

As far as I can tell from the pictures, the caterpillars are more or less colorless on their own; they turn green when they eat green things.

It has not escaped my attention that the caterpillars bear a passing resemblance to the ones I found in the potter wasp nests, back in July. I mean, I don't think they're the exact same species, but they're roughly the same size and seem to have a similar overall shape, so it's possible that they're in the same family. As if I could feel any worse about the whole potter wasp thing.

Anyway. This is what they do to Episicas:

Or at least mostly what they do to Episcias. They also leave droppings (called frass) around, some of which get stuck in the hair on the leaves. So even the leaves they leave intact wind up looking worse.

Because caterpillars are frassholes.

Excuses, excuses

Hi again.

Whatever you might have heard, I have not run off to Ecuador with everybody's donations. (I don't even speak Ecuadorian.) What's happened instead has been sort of a perfect storm of blogular interference.

• As I've mentioned before, my computer has been essentially out of memory for a few months, so it's been difficult to get photos to post to the blog.
• But -- I've gotten a new computer! With Windows 7 (The old computer has XP.) and about eight times more memory! So there have been files to transfer, and programs to install! Which also takes time, even under the best of circumstances.
• But these are not particularly good circumstances. When I tried to upload a new batch of photos from the camera to the new computer, yesterday, it acted like there was something corrupted about the files and refused to upload them.
• My attempts to fix that problem resulted in accidentally installing at least one malware program, but I did upload the photos eventually.
• But after dropping everything to get rid of the malware, I discovered that I couldn't edit the photos I'd supposedly uploaded. I couldn't even locate them.
• This is because (it turns out) the photos weren't saved to the desktop, which is where I'd told the camera to save to, but instead, they were sent to a folder nine folder-layers deep, many of which folders have ridiculously non-intuitive names, and a few of which were even hidden (invisible) folders, so I wouldn't have been able to happen on them even if I'd searched the whole computer systematically. (C --> [my account] --> Users --> AppData --> Roaming --> OLYMPUS --> OLYMPUS Master --> store ["Store?!?" -Mr. S.] --> 20130914145749 --> the pictures.)
• And in the process of trying to unhide the hidden folders, I wound up with a desktop full of previously-hidden TMP files, which I then couldn't figure out what they were, how they'd gotten on my new computer in the first place, how to hide them again, or whether or not I wanted to.
• At which point I figured that, since every time I'd touched the computer yesterday, I'd just made something worse, it might be best to pretend that the day had never happened, and go back to the system restore point from before I'd tried to do all this stuff. Just erase the whole chalkboard and start over. But restore points don't work that way. Which is something I have to re-learn every time I'm tempted to use system restore, because I am not smrt. So, this didn't hide all the TMP files, remove the Olympus program, erase all traces of the malware, or do anything else I'd wanted it to do.
• Which is pretty much when I renounced all worldly possessions and became a Buddhist monk. Which is doubly weird, because I'm not even Buddhist.
• ALSO, I've been trying for a few weeks to get yearbook pictures of some of the plants, which is tiring on its own, and dependent on the cooperation of the weather.
• And there's the usual watering and stuff, which I don't keep up with incredibly well even under ideal circumstances.
• It's been intermittently cold at night, so I've been moving plants in and out a lot, which is exhausting,
• and also means that when I'm trying to water plants, I have to finish watering before it gets cold out, so I'm always doing it in a rush, plus
• it's the time of year when I have to be thinking about bringing them in permanently, soon, and where the hell are they all going to go?
• Also I've found more scale, on various plants, in various rooms as well as outside.
• And some unknown small but prolific caterpillar (one of the geometrid moths?) ate the Episcias in my office into dead lacy parodies of their former selves, so those of you who objected to me calling houseplant pest bingo two or three weeks ago, on the grounds that you can't count caterpillars as houseplant pests if the plant isn't actually in the house when it has the caterpillars -- well, I've done it for real now, then. (How this happened is a question I can't even begin to answer. The Episcias in question haven't been outside all summer, not even for a few minutes to take photos of.)

So.

Rest assured that I have not forgotten that the blog exists, I'm really unlikely to do so, and nobody's in the hospital or anything. I just don't have time, and when I do have time, I'm usually not capable of anything besides staring at a blank wall, whimpering quietly. Sometimes I'm not even together enough to whimper, and whimpering would be a sign of progress.

The good news, if there is good news, is that I'm still taking pictures of plants doing things, so someday, someday, there will be a whole lot of horribly outdated posts about what the plants were doing over the last six weeks or so.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture, and Mercury is still in retrograde

First the Sheba picture:


First, this is more or less the picture I was trying to get for last week's post. It would have been better if the original image hadn't been tilted by about 30 degrees, 'cause then I wouldn't have had to cut her tongue off, but hey, we're making progress, and I really like this picture despite the missing tongue, so I'm not going to complain.

Second:

I've received an e-mail from a reader who tells me that the PATSP header picture has been displaying differently for him/r for the last few weeks:

A minor change has occurred in how your page appears to me; the title block no longer has a full background of the transmitted light leaf picture: instead, the picture fills part of the title box, with a thick vertical stripe of background color at the top and bottom of the box. I think it's been like this for a few weeks. Perhaps this is purposeful, but just in case it's not, I'm using Firefox 6.0 and Windows 7.

So I was wondering whether A) this is happening for anybody else (I'm using Firefox 6.0 and Windows XP, and it looks fine to me.), and B) whether anybody has any ideas about what to do to fix it. I've tried deleting and re-uploading the photo, which didn't help. I haven't changed anything about the site except the colors and the header, and the header is exactly the same size (640 x 233 px) as the previous headers, so if they worked, this should also.

This is what the header looks like to me in Firefox:


In Internet Explorer (which I never use), I get the background-color bars at the top and bottom of the header, though. How about yourself?




Naturally one blames Mercury. Anybody with any theories about what's going on or ideas for how to stop it is invited to share. I suspect what's going to have to happen is that I'm going to have to redesign the blog template, though I don't want to.

Mercury in Retrograde

When I got up yesterday morning, Microsoft Updates had downloaded a new update for my computer, which, when installed, caused my computer to deny me access to all of my Excel files. Which are numerous, and important. I spent a couple hours trying to deal with it myself (System Restore didn't help.), followed by an hour and five minutes on the phone with a very nice man from India. He was able to fix everything because the husband had an installation disk for MS Excel 2003: whatever the problem was, it had something to do with MS Office 2002. Had the husband not had the installation disc, I would have been unable to access Excel from this computer forever after, apparently. (The alternative -- spending $130 to buy MS Office 2010 -- was not an option.)

(Computers! Why do we put up with them?)

This ate up the entire morning. The afternoon was spent being Way Too Hot in Iowa City, which was unpleasant (though I did get to see WCW for the first time in months and months, which was cool). Then we came home, put away groceries, got started on watering the 50 plants left to be watered for this particular round of watering, and then the husband noticed Sheba was limping around.

Upon examination, this turned out to be a split toenail. It's not bleeding, and she doesn't actually seem that uncomfortable about it, but of course a little Googling led to anxiety, and anxiety to dithering, and eventually we called an actual veterinary-type source, who said basically that the broken part of the toenail will need to come off, but it's probably not an emergency (which is good, since this happened on a Saturday night, so it's at least 36 hours before the vet will be open) unless Sheba seems particularly distressed about it. She licks the foot a lot, and (understandably) tries to bite us if we attempt to handle the foot at all, but other than those two things, you'd never know anything was going on, so we can probably wait to see the vet on Monday. But still. This took up essentially the whole evening.

So my day yesterday was basically 1) panic about computer, 2) heat stress, 3) frantic attempt to water, 4) panic about Sheba, 5) more watering 6) collapse. Hence the sort of whiny and abotanical post today. I'll do better tomorrow.

I think.

Maybe Tuesday.

By the way: Mercury actually is in retrograde at the moment (explanatory link -- see fn. 1), so if you need an explanation for anything going wrong for the next few weeks, you can use that. You're welcome.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Well, it ate my life from about 11:30 PM on Wednesday night until about 3:30 PM on Friday afternoon, but I think, I'm pretty sure, the malware "MS Removal Tool" is no longer on my computer. Among other things, I have a different antivirus program now.

I had been using Avira, because I didn't have the money to renew Symantec in February when the subscription ended -- Avira is free -- and because previous experience with Symantec and McAfee had left me frustrated with how much they slowed down my computer. So when I saw people in the comments at Consumerist talking up Avira, it seemed like a good idea. The malware problem isn't necessarily Avira's fault; I think it would probably have gotten me even if I'd had Symantec or McAfee, though Symantec and McAfee also sometimes warn you about problematic sites before you click. So I don't know. In any case, McAfee didn't cost me anything: the husband had purchased a subscription valid for installation on up to three computers, a long time ago (I'd gone with Avira anyway because of concerns about my system's speed), so I just used the one remaining installation from that.

It also turned up four viruses that Avira hadn't caught (all trojans, and relatively minor), though, again, in fairness to Avira, I don't know when those viruses showed up -- for all I know they could have been let in by MS Removal Tool at some point after I uninstalled Avira.

So. Now things are possibly back to normal. I don't think I'll feel entirely comfortable on my computer for a while, but I think I can at least use it again. Of course, now I also have a couple days of back e-mails to catch up on.

Maybe I should just be Amish. Find some splinter group that permits air conditioning and fluorescent lighting and married gay couples.

Yeah, doesn't sound likely to me either.

Anyway. So the whole thing's been pretty traumatic. We've also recently had problems with our car (as of 10 June; it was fixed yesterday too), and the VCR ate a tape of Batman Returns Friday morning -- which how we came to have the tape is a long story, and why we were watching it is an even longer story, but it's not what it sounds like, I swear -- so I was pretty sure Mercury had to be in retrograde,¹ but no, I am assured that it is not. So I'm blaming the full moon and/or lunar eclipse instead. (That's the nice thing about astrology -- there's always a reason for everything after the fact.)

Anyway. So that's how things have been lately, and here is a picture of a toad.


The toad's not a pet or anything; it just happened to be in the pictures folder.

And a picture of Nina, clinging to her water-spotted glass.


The reader may wish to pretend that they're not hard-water spots, but blurred raindrops. Though they're not really that blurred. And I've already told you they're hard-water spots.
-

¹ Mercury in retrograde is an inside joke from a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that I no longer remember for sure who the inside joke was originally with or why it was funny, but the husband and I have adopted it for use any time a number of things go wrong simultaneously, because Mercury is retrograde a lot (about three months out of the year) and why not. "Real" astrologers claim it's more likely to produce failures of communication, not failures of technology, though increasingly the two are the same thing, given how much communication is mediated by technology now, so at some point I stopped making the distinction.