It's going to be a long six weeks.

I'm so tired. I'm deep in the middle of one of my two busiest times of year, paying work-wise. The other time is always from January to May. Between those periods, work is steady but not usually overwhelming. Right now, I'm overwhelmed, and I've got a solid six weeks to go on this autumn's tsunami of work.

Because I work from a home office, Little Woodchuck is with me all the time. When I go through one of these crazy-busy stretches, she can barely stand it. I can't give her the attention she's accustomed to, and deserves, and by the end of the day we're both exhausted. Me moreso than LW, of course, because she gets a nice long nap in the middle of the day. Those two hours while she naps are my most productive. I quite literally crank like hell, and count every precious minute.

And at the end of the next six weeks, I'll be faced with the ambulance chase that is getting the farm ready for winter. I'll catch up on my much-needed sleep sometime in December. In the meantime, it's two pots of coffee per day and elevated blood pressure. Sigh.

Over the weekend, we found a gorgeous Papilio polyxenes caterpillar wandering around in the flower bed in front of the house. It had been feeding on the wild Queen Anne's Lace that had managed to find a foothold in my sadly neglected flowerbed. This cat was looking for a place to pupate, so we left it alone after taking a few pictures.

This morning I found its pupa!!!!! I'm going to move it to a safer place, it's in a vulnerable spot right now, and either in two weeks or next spring a Black Swallowtail butterfly will emerge. We've raised hundreds of native butterfly and moth caterpillars of many species from hatchling to adulthood, and swallowtails are easy compared to some other species. Last year I raised at least two dozen Monarch butterflies from hatch to emergence, this year not a single one. It was not a good year for the Monarchs. Too much cold, too much rain.