Baby 'marties!!

Big news from the vegie patch tonight.. baby tomatoes!!

Made this discovery during the usual post-work slater drowning ritual. I did discover that this process is somewhat more fun if you can come up with a war chant to pass the time. I started with

Kill the slaters, end their culture. Kill the slaters, end their culture...

When that got a little boring, I came up with a ditty of my own, but I can't remember the exact words now. 10 points for anyone who can pick the "kill the slaters" reference, by the way.

Another exciting discovery in the patch:

I know it's a dodgy photo, but that appeared to me to be a baby praying mantis! That was the best shot I could get with my camera phone - little beggar was charging around at high speed, too. This was a very exciting discovery, and a good excuse to use the word ootheca.

This is an older photo from my garden, of an ootheca on a citrus leaf. Hopefully the presence of my one tiny mantis means there are some more out in the garden somewhere??

Anyway, I ended up having the following conversation with myself:

me: Ootheca, that's an awesome word, but sadly so obscure that you wouldn't get to use it that often.

me: Unless, of course, you're an entomologist.

me: Entomologist, or etymologist? I always get those two confused.

me: Entomologist. On the other hand, it's such an awesome word, I bet a fair few etymologists would have a soft spot for it too.

And having had it verified that my parents do read this blog (*waves!*), I have to give a shout out to my dad - thanks dad, for teaching me such awesome things as the meanings of entomology and etymology :). Today I learnt that "till" was in usage before "until", and my lifelong belief that till derived from until is completely wrong.

Now, what else. I got that picture of Tess and Chardy that I promised earlier :) Tess wasn't all that interested in talking to Chardy today, unfortunately.

And finally, I've started doing some deadly treadly training. It's always been one of my goals in life to be able to cycle to work (not particularly at this job, just at some point in life). Well I've bumped up the priority of that goal, since I'm not making very much progress towards getting back on to my beloved public transport.

Gotta take it nice and slow though, so rather than rush out and buy an expensive fancy bike, I thought I'd hop on the exercise bike and get an idea of how hard it's going to be for me to get all the way to work. Tonight I went 6km on the exercise bike in 16 minutes. The distance to work is 13 or 14km, so that's a pretty good start.