Ladyparts and the apple...

While I was working on my windows outdoors today, a ladybug landed on my glasses. I think she fell off the deck staircase that I was standing under. Usually they'll fly away again pretty quickly if you start trying to handle them much, but this one seems to have some sort of problem with her wings because the couple of times she's tried she just ended up falling over. (I'm referring to her as a female because she's fairly large compared to the other ladybugs I've seen around lately, and the females are - to my knowledge - usually the larger of the sexes in the species.)

Well, she ended up staying on my hand for 30 minutes... So I did an impromptu photoshoot with her in the kitchen, as it was fair practice in macro photography with a fast moving subject (not that the macro feature of my digital camera is very good but I didn't have time to go dig out my Canon).

After I'd put her back on my hand, I decided to see how long she'd stay. Well, 1 hour turned into 2 hours, even while I was using my hands to work on projects, and so I finally moved her off of my hand. Currently (it's been over 3 hours now and counting), she's resting on the velveteen bag my little digicam is usually in, next to my laptop. She moves around every once in a while, preens constantly, does these funny little aerobics steps...but she's sticking around.

I've taken to calling her "Ladyparts." Because I have a silly/12-year-old-boy sense of humor? Perhaps!

This may, in part, be because my room is about 59 degrees Fahrenheit in temperature and the chill makes insects sluggish. What can I say? I like it cold.

I sort of have this urge now to keep ladybugs as pets. Outdoors, they can live for up to 2 years! But in a container, even with aphids and pollen and moisture sources, they would probably only live a couple weeks tops. This makes me sad...

Meanwhile, I will likely post some more stuff at KeroseneCamera soon. And for the sake of clarification, the young lady featured in the background of the photo in this post is my youngest sister.