Snoqualmie

Squish blorp waddle.

I spent an hour or so today pulling up weeds and turning over soil in my proto-vegetable garden. Actually, I think that should technically be my proto-vegetable proto-garden, since both the garden and the vegetables are in their infancy. Either way, it's the place where I was poking around with a screwdriver (because I still lack proper gardening implements) and yanking at stems and roots. I'm now thinking that, after what I found, I should hang a sign on it saying Dianna's Amazing Menagerie Of Gross Things and start charging admission.

There were the ordinary run-of-the-mill earthworms, and the really big fat wiggly run-of-the-mill earthworms. There was a generous assortment of pillbugs, earwigs and slugs of varying size and sliminess. There was one fat, bright green caterpillar and something which was probably another slug but looked for all the world like a moving pickled mushroom. I found an area that I started thinking of as the metaphorically evil section of the garden, if my garden were a children's story involving anthropomorphized small crawly creatures. It was dark, dank, slimy and the stems of the plants were yellow and mushy instead of green and firm. There was a decomposed root of some kind, hollow most of the way through and sitting in a bed of black slime, looking like the place that the well-meaning pillbug mother sternly forbids her adventurous pillbug children to go near. They go anyway, of course, which is when they discover the little cluster of bright white spider eggs nestled in one end of the root. They look brittle and crunchy, but no pillbug, no matter how bright-eyed and mischievous, is ever going to squish one to find out. Neither will I.

There was also some strange winged bug that I'm afraid may have been a mosquito, humping the ground in an obscene ritual of egg-laying. I think I gained a few bravery points with my downstairs neighbor's son for poking it with a twig to make it go lay its eggs somewhere else, but probably lost all chance of being considered cool in the 11-year-old scheme of things for admitting that I don't actually kill bugs. Hopeless hippie dorkdom is now mine, for all eternity. I may as well be burning incense and listening to world music.