Tuesday 29 June 2010

Two McSnaffle Facts

There are two aspects of my character that have remained constant over the period of study (which is to say that they seem quite true today, and I half-remember them having being true at an undetermined point in the previousness).

These facts are as listed here:

1. I always eat too much at barbecues.

2. My hayfever is always worse after rain.

I suspect that the first is due to a combination of greed, and choice. I half-remember reading about a study that found that people tend to eat more when there is a wider choice of food available. Even a meal consisting of different coloured pasta resulted in the study participants eating more than they did when the same meal was presented with uniformly mono-chromatic pasta.

Barbecues, in my experience, tend to have a wide variety of tasty foodstuffs on offer.

Whatever the underlying cause, the current significance of these truths is that I attended a barbecue yesterday evening, and there was some light precipitation in the same time frame.

So this morning I have a rather sore tummy and a very drippy nose.

Sunday 27 June 2010

Larva in my dining chairs

The fixing holes in my wooden dining chairs are exactly the right size for an unidentified insect to hide its larva, swaddled in green leaves.

In all, six holes across three chairs have tell-tale little green leaves peeking out of them, and when I introduce the end of a sharp stick, each hole reveals a chrysalis or larva, orange-brown, gooey in death.

The chairs are in the conservatory, which is regularly exposed to the outside, for reasons of thermal ventilation.

More mysterious is why one chair was spared from the infestation/colonisation.