Larvae, and a Musical Neighbor

Speckled wood butterfly on our "Bowl of Beauty" peony

I pre-wrote some of this post last night, thinking that rather than blogging, I would be on my way to Heathrow airport early this morning to pick up my brother and his family. They're visiting for a week from the USA -- the first time they've come to England! A landmark occasion for all of us.

But then my brother texted in the middle of the night and said the first leg of their flight landed late and they'd missed their connecting flight to London, so they're on a later plane, coming in around 1 p.m. (They're going to be exhausted.) And I'm blogging as usual.

With that in mind, I spent yesterday getting the house ready for visitors. I mowed the lawn, for example, and dealt with simple cleaning. There's more to be done but it's presentable, which is about as good as it ever gets around here. (They're not staying with us -- they have a hotel -- but the place still needs to look decent.)

While cleaning up the garden I threw out lots of flower stalks from the green alkanet. The flowers have more or less faded and I don't want them going to seed. We already have more alkanet than we can handle.

But while throwing them in the garden waste bag, I saw several little larval ladybirds like the one above (which was on a hellebore). They're attracted to any plant with aphids, which they eat -- and alkanet has plenty of aphids. So then I had to extract the alkanet from the yard waste bag and examine the stalks to make sure I saved what larvae I could find. I retrieved about ten of them and put them on some of the remaining alkanet in the garden.

This is why I hate weeding. It not only kills the weeds, but whatever critters are living ON the weeds!

Then, in the afternoon, I went to a pub outing with some former co-workers. It was a farewell hurrah for another guy who's retiring, and for my former boss's boss, who's also leaving. It was fun catching up with everyone from work again. Have I really only been gone six weeks? It feels like a lifetime! I have one more going-away event to attend on June 12, our end-of-the-year luncheon, and then I will be well and truly finished with that job.

Here's a weird little video for you. Through all the warm weather last week, I kept hearing a woman singing operatically. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, and in fact I still don't exactly know. It's from one of the apartments behind us. Apparently we have a neighbor who's a singer, or fancies herself one.

I thought I'd share this little urban peculiarity. In the video I think she's just singing scales, or some rudimentary vocal exercise. The sound isn't terribly clear but if you crank the volume you should hear her right at the start, and then around the 15- and 30-second marks.

We often have perplexing music coming from those apartments. Remember our flutist from years ago? I'm not complaining, though -- it's better than listening to leaf-blowers and lawn mowers!

Incidentally, it's interesting to see -- in that linked video clip of the flutist -- how healthy our mock orange (Philadelphus) looked. It's quite straggly this year, with few leaves and flowers. I'm not sure why.