I’m leaving home for a while + a little update on me

Hello everyone, I just wanted to give you a little bit of an update because I'm going to be leaving home for a little bit. The air quality over here has been really bad and there's so much haze and just smog in the air and it's been pretty hard to tolerate. I'm usually fairly tolerant. I've been here a few summers either visiting or living here and we've had smoke before and I've gotten through it pretty well but this summer it's been different because it's been so close to home and so I decided that with my boyfriend and I we would go to the west coast for a little bit and to distract ourselves a little bit from everything going on over here and get some fresh air which we both really need. He's a surveyor and he works outdoors so he's had to wear a really big mask for most of it and I can't imagine it's comfortable so I think we're both really going to enjoy having a bit of a break and getting the crisp sea air which I'm very excited for. Of course I wanted to give a little more of an update in this video since obviously it's a little bit different. It's really hard to film out here with all the smoke so I did want to tell you guys a couple shenanigans I've been up to recently and that is I have been raising caterpillars. Being able to raise caterpillars has been possibly one of the weirdest things I've done so far living here. I will explain, I will tell the story from the beginning. My parents had guests over at their house and that night the porch light was left on and so that morning I went over there to visit because it was during the heat wave and I was coming over a lot to enjoy the A.C. and so I noticed that a what I believe is a one-eyed sphinx moth was at the door and was right under the lamp and looked very exhausted. She had been very distracted by the light that had been left on and she had also been heavily pregnant and so she had left all these little eggs on a window sill nearby. I felt really bad because moths like that should leave their eggs on trees. For example, the sphinx moths eat willow leaves and so if she hadn't been distracted by the light she would have probably flown to a nearby willow tree and had her babies there. The eggs from the moth have a residue on them that makes them stick to anything they come in contact with and so it would be really tricky to remove them from the window sill and move them to a willow tree without breaking most of the eggs. So what I did was I put fresh willow leaves around the eggs waiting for them to be born and then I had about 60 caterpillars after about a week or two and they were all climbing all over the window sill and I didn't know what to do with them so I ended up just putting them in a big jar with a bunch of willow leaves so they could eat the leaves while the other caterpillars were being born. One percent of baby caterpillars actually make it to adulthood and that's because the majority of them feed birds and feed other creatures and it's a very important part of nature's life cycle. And so I went and I put a bunch in the trees and I just kept two because I thought it would be really great to take some photographs of the caterpillars and show the whole process of the caterpillars transforming into moths to my former students because they're really interested in that whole life process and they're always so curious and none of them as far as I know have had the opportunity to witness caterpillars transform and so I wanted to do that as well. Anyway I hope to share with you an update on the caterpillar situation and also I will be sharing with you next week some highlights hopefully from my little trip and I appreciate you watching this all the way through if you've lasted this long because I clearly didn't have a plan for this video but I still wanted to share at least something with you. Last but not least I wanted to follow the rest of this video with a little clip of one of the songs that my brother recently composed. He's a very talented musician. He recently made a lullaby that I've been listening to and it has brought me so much comfort during this strange strange time in the valley and I really wanted to share this because I just thought it was beautiful. So I hope you enjoy it and if you want to get updates on him you can of course follow him on Instagram and get in contact with him. Anyway I hope you have a wonderful day and you enjoy the music. Goodbye. to give you this it's my love's lullaby