What on earth are you doing?

Every once in a while the five-year-old in my brain gets confused by some of the things the adult (or should I say "adult") in my brain insists upon doing.

Today's photo (which isn't entirely pointless. Sorry if I've confused anyone) is an example of that fact in action.

The finger featured under the dragonfly would be mine. As you've probably guessed, I was holding the dragonfly so I could take a picture of it. I also have a photo from the other angle that my father took, but my two fans don't get to see that one because it actually has my face in it and we all already know that, at least in the world of the blog, I have no face.

That wasn't the first dragonfly I picked up yesterday. There were... oh, I'd say about five different tries at that particular pose.

That's a very weird thing, you know.

Or maybe you don't.

You see, although I have a thing for spiders that's obvious to anyone who's read the blog more than once, what those new to the program won't know is that I'm more than a little bit of an entomophobe. Insectophobe, if you prefer. I've had a fear of insects ever since I can remember.

A serious one.

I'm not kidding when I tell you that I once had a butterfly land on me and as a result my parents couldn't convince me to go outside for several days.

Anyway, through a smidgen of willpower and a lot of necessity (I do, after all, work as a naturalist), I've managed to get so that I can deal with insects. Not just looking at them, even. I've been known to grab a handful of crickets to throw in with the salamander... although that's a pretty new thing. When we started feeding with crickets I had to get someone else to handle them at first. That was kind of inconvenient, so eventually I just sucked it up and made myself do it.

That's where the five-year-old in my brain comes in.

My adult self knows that a handful of crickets isn't going to give me cooties, or that digging in the mealworm tank won't result in the loss of a finger. My five-year-old self watches me do those very things and wonders what the HELL is going on. Instinct tells me that I'm doing something very, very wrong and that it would probably be best to run away very quickly, arms flailing.

You have to do the running away part with arms flailing. Otherwise you don't look nearly enough like a scaredy cat.

I suppose what I'm saying is that it's a wonder I didn't burst my brain yesterday. My inner pointless photographer insisted on close-ups, while my kindergartener was in the back going ew ew ew she's touching a bug...

And she didn't die.

Amazing.

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Today's photo serves more than one purpose, which is totally destroying the pointlessness of the blog. Ah well. The other reason for the NON-pointless photo was to warn you that this next little while you'll be putting up with a lot of dragonfly photos. We're sort of being swarmed by dragonflies at the moment, because the high water levels have led to a pretty huge mosquito population. That in turn means more food for their predators, and THAT in turn means that dragonflies become easy targets for pointless photography.

And stupid photoeditor games.

Don't say you haven't been warned.