A Maritime Pompeii

From Newsweek:

"Pisa is famous for its leaning tower, but archeologists there are now uncovering an amazing fleet of ancient ships, some complete with crew and cargo. . ."

Cool!

How Could Such an Angel Cause Any Trouble at All?

Photo Courtesy of John Lee.

C'mmon, Let Me Drive!

Photo Courtesy of John Lee.

Melts in Your Mouth...

I realized after I posted yesterday that I can be thankful, at least, that she did not realize that she could eat the sugar. That would have been a whole 'nother world of trouble.

Sticky Fingers

I seriously need a maid or something. I can hardly keep up with my house as it is...I'm not managing to get unpacked at all.

Now there's sugar stuck to everything.

I've got this little thing a friend loaned me. She called it a "sensory station". Basically, it's a little table with raised edges that comes a foot or so off the ground, perfect height for Ravenna, and you put stuff in for her to feel and mess around with.

Somehow I had the bright idea this morning to put sugar in it for her -- which was AWESOME -- until she dumped it everywhere, and got it stuck to her hands, and her clothes, and ran around touching everything.

Now the floor, everywhere, not just at the station, is sticky. And the bed is sticky. And...well...generally, everything, is sticky.

I'm cleaning the sugar out tonight while she sleeps. Tomorrow it will be wood shavings, or oats, or something.

Botched Rescue

I just rescued a spider.

I've recently moved, and much of my stuff is still in boxes. Part way through moving, I ran out of packing tape, so I started using duct tape for some of the boxes. It works just as well, although it doesn't always seem to hold to the cardboard quite as well, so sometimes you get corners of it peeling off and hanging down.

Anyways, I was working around some of the boxes tonight and noticed a spider stuck to some duct tape that had been coming off one of them. Further inspection revealed that he was still living, but was quite stuck and incapable of freeing himself.

My first instinct was to leave him. But after a short while I had a change of heart and set about trying to rescue him. I found myself a dull paring knife and talked him through what we were doing as I gently, gently worked his legs away from the tape. His first inclination upon having a leg freed was to grab onto whatever he could with it...which was often the same bit of tape I had just freed it from. After a time, I got him to start clinging to an envelope with the legs I freed, rather than sticking them back on the tape. And after a bit more, he was entirely on the envelope. But somewhere in that struggle something went wrong, and a single leg remained stuck to the tape. Sans spider. And spider, sans leg.

He limped around the envelope, seemingly glad to be freed, but confused and lame.

I apologized for the leg.

Then I took him outside near some bushes, overturned a shallow box to provide him some cover if needed, and released him. I don't know how he'll do, injured as he is.

Was he better off stuck to the tape, dying slowly of starvation?

Or freed in his mangled state?

I'm not really sure.