Butterfly Days

I have been flitting around like a butterfly this summer.  I am sorry I have not been posting. I've had lots of things to say and now they will mostly go unsaid because of my flitting about. At least I've made progress on several decluttering projects:  we have two dozen cans half full of paint. I don't want them ending up in the landfill, so I am trying to empty the by painting closets. The other project is reviewing our 50-year-old collection of slides and filing them in tidy little boxes.  They've already been transferred to DVDs. We have one more tray of slides to review and then we'll give away our slide projector and the empty trays. I hope we'll have takers.

Meanwhile, we've begun to suspect that we will not see the large crop of monarch caterpillars like the one we had last year. We have plenty of milkweed, but now it looks tattered, wilted, spent. We've seen monarchs laying eggs on the milkweed, but we've seen only one caterpillar. One lovely fat one appeared  out back at the beginning of August. He looked as if he was ready to spin a chrysalis, but we never saw one. Meanwhile, on the front porch, we found a chrysalis that something had bitten into. Not good.

We've seen other kinds of butterflies--fritillaries, swallowtails, and this magnificent Common Buckeye.