Pins and Needles 9: Butterflies of the Garden Variety

Hey ya'll

so basically its been a really long time since I last updated but finally, now that my research seminar is over, I can finally take some time off to myself to blog a little bit about what's new with me. First of all, a little re-cap, things have been going pretty well for the past month or so (despite the enormity of the workload) and as we draw to the third week of May, we've finally come to the end of the semester for the class I teach every weekend. I must say, all of our little children have matured by leaps and bounds. They just sat for their final exam last Saturday and I must say I am very impressed at the way many of them have improved in terms of their usage of the English language. In that way, I believe the drama session has helped them with applying the new words they've learnt within the context of conversation. It's a momentous occasion; by little chrysalids are all developing into full-fledged butterflies. Speaking of butterflies, whilst swinging about the forest canopy at the Skytrex in Bukit Cahaya, Shah Alam, Ray and I managed to spot many interesting forms of wildlife including monkeys, scale-insects and even a flying-lizard!

just regular tree-swinging folk

All in all it was an awesome trip and, I suppose if I ever need to sit in a tree to prevent it from being cut down by nasty nasty loggers in the future, I'd know how! The other thing I got up to this month was to organize my Lycaenidae collection. Lycaenid butterflies are extremely hard to spread and mount, presumably because of their small size and well, I will admit that I'm not exactly the most delicate of persons in the way I deal with things so, as you can imagine, amongst my dozens of lycaenid specimens there will be some that exhibit various missing body parts, like broken legs and popped-off heads. But then again, as a friend of mine told me "leg's and other body parts do not generally count during the appraisal of specimens" but... oh well. Anyway, he's got a rather awesome collection of specimens himself... possibly lightyears more impressive than the butterflies of the garden-variety which I usually collect.

The miniature parade!!!

On a separate note, I'll be making a trip to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah later in the year with Ray and a bunch of friends so... who knows what kind of butterflies we'll find there!!! Till next time.