Bruce Letters: Bugs

In this month’s mystery photo, you get to guess the purpose of this mini devils tower (end of post answer):

We celebrated Rosh Hashanah a few weeks ago, the Jewish New Year, with two other couples. There was a lot of good food, even after our ovens ate much of it in impressive smoke belching displays (we need to learn how to use oven timers). I managed to launch that cooked fish on the left, off the oven, over the counter, and onto a chair, somehow landing right side up:

To further demonstrate my occasional crazy behavior, here I am dialed into three work conference calls at the same time. I do it for the technological challenge, not for any productive reason, as I’m not able to converse with any one of those calls, and when I try, I often un-mute the wrong one and everyone else joins me in being very confused:

I’ve been having fun touring Salt Lake on my bike, seeing what interesting things pop up. Here is a monument to the short lived Pony Express. For $5 (>$100 today) you could send a 0.5 oz letter, which would be carried by a < 125lb rider at 15 mph, changing horses every 15 miles, and changing riders every 10 hours, day an night, crossing the country in 8 days.

And here is a Matterhorn replica found in the Swiss section of a very pretty and flower full Peace Garden:

Not far from there was another Pyramid, used by a group that does ‘Modern Mummification’. Human prices start at $70k, but you can do your pet and have him live in your living room forever for $20k:

Last weekend we drove to Bolder to attend Noah’s Master’s concert … he did good:

We brought Irena a sampling of roses from her backyard (she and Boris have been in the UK and NH for a few months), which is flowering wonderfully:

We met up with one of Helen’s friends for a quick hike up the famous Bolder Flatirons:

Yesterday I went on a hike up the trail near here. Even red-green colorblind me could see beautiful colors in the changing trees:

It snowed last weekend, so the mountains have prettied up:

My goal was to climb Black Mountain, which is somewhere along this ridge on the left:

I overshot it (apparently it is not marked) and hiked almost to the other end where I met up with another crazy hiker who had also underestimated his hike (supposed to be 4 hours, we ended up at 9 hours). We teamed up, keeping each other company for the long hike back. Fortunately, he had found a flashlight someone had lost … came in pretty handy as we didn’t make it back until 2 hours after sunset.

I’m goanna close with some bug photos. Zach, close your eyes as you will not like this first one, my first tarantula:

These guys were guarding the entrance to what I imagined to be the New York City for wasps:

This guy I had never met until yesterday. He is called a Jerusalem Cricket, which is really weird as he is not a cricket and he is not found in Jerusalem. He is big (2-3”) and scary looking, but relatively harmless (he can bite, but no venom):