Critically Endangered
Around the World in 80 Days - Day 49
These are from Ukraine, which obviously we are not even remotely near now with Phileas Fogg. We are just staring behind us I guess and have exceptionally good eyesight. The only description I saw of these was very short and essentially said they were pretty boring and plain. I could not find any pictures of them, and though they said plain green, they did not give any idea what sort of green. I know these are from the eastern border of Ukraine, toward the south. They are only known from one spot, about 2 1/2 to 5 square miles. The area is at risk because of farms taking over, and wildfires. Unfortunately that is the extent of my knowledge of these particular crickets.
I got to spend some time with Hawaii Twin today which is always good. First I sent my husband and kids, they were helping her with moving stuff until I was able to get there too. She used to be my photography buddy and also my shopping buddy. She and I would meander through Target or the grocery store just chatting mostly and sort of shopping but mainly socializing. I had to take advanced photography to get my photography degree, even though I'd been a professional photographer for some time and didn't learn anything in the class. As most photography classes will do, we had to do a "10 strangers" project. I'd already had to do one in an different class, so I decided to add another element to my project to make it both more difficult and less random. I chose to photograph people who are generally looked down upon or considered outsiders, I wanted to show that they have beauty and humanity even though many may avoid them. I photographed a stripper, a truck driver, some homeless, a tattoo artist, and some others. One of the funniest memories with my "twin" is from when we went to find some homeless people to photograph. We wandered all around Portland. We talked for quite some time with a couple guys, gave them gloves and things like that, heard their story, told them why we were wanting someone to photograph, and I got the pictures I needed for the project. We were commenting to each other though about how void of homeless Portland seemed to be, because they were pretty much the only ones we saw. We eventually gave up and went back to the car. When we got to the car we saw a line of homeless going almost the whole way around the block. Come to find out, we'd parked by the Union Gospel Mission (I donated a ton of masks I made to them back when masks were really tough to come by). We didn't want to bother people who were in line because they were waiting for a meal, but it just struck us as so typical. Wander for an hour everywhere hoping to find something, then go back to the car and there it is. If we had been looking for bees, we'd have gone to a flower garden or something, go back to the car, and a swarm would have decided to land on the car.