you can always count on five minutes of nature to fix you up

My brain just turned to mush today. I was deciphering some spreadsheets for work – nasty, complicated things with eighteen million little internal references, none of the calculations complicated in themselves, but a spaghetti soup of one cell referring to another to another to another to another – and since I didn’t build them, I’m not familiar with them, and I needed to potentially debug a glitch. At some point, I realized my brain was just simply … not operational.

“Go Outside,” said Inner WiseWoman.

“Five more minutes" I grumbled back.

“GO OUTSIDE.”

“There is nothing to see,” I groused. “Fall is here. Everything’s turning brown. Mmnneeehhh.”[that’s how I spell whining.]

“You just sit down on the ground, little lady,” my I.W.W. scolded.

“Fine. Harrumph”. I sat down at the edge of the woods.

And then this happened.

Hello! I believe this is a katydid. It sat there vibrating slightly, something on its back pulsing in and out of light, as though it were mirror-signaling the mothership. Look at its…shoulder blades, for lack of a better term.

See it’s sort of dark and compressed? We’ll call this “Off”.

 

Now that same spot is raised and reflecting the sun. We’ll call this “On”.

Off – on – off – on. I took pictures like mad, until my camera suddenly stopped. Crap. I yelled at it. Had I melted it with the power of my fried brain? Because I can do that to my tools – nothing is safe from my brainwaves.

Nope, it turned out my SD card was full. Not unlike my head. Just as I had had to make myself go outside to recharge, I now needed to go back in to download these pictures so that I could wipe the card. But I felt at least partly restored, so I went back inside. Within a few minutes – with the assistance of the Extend-o-Brain known as Kevin – the spreadsheets were beaten into submission. 

I downloaded the pictures.

CHECK OUT THOSE EYEBALLS.

And now – when I typically share a video on YouTube, it’s my own crappy little video of a tadpole, or utter blackness filled with the calls of barred owls. (It will be a while before I win an Oscar for nature documentary.)  The video I’m about to share with you is NOT mine; I found it when researching this post. It is fabulous. Well, if your definition of fabulous includes watching a katydid in super close-up grooming its foot, and then seemingly examining the lens of the camera that’s filming it, actually kind of bobbing up and down and side to side as though to get a good look, and then turning its butt to the viewer, then you’re in for a treat. The rest of you probably haven’t even gotten this far in this post. so psssshhhhhh, who needs you.

Enjoy!