Mantis, Meet Mantis

This year we bought a kiwi green Honda Element.  It was time, our old car broke down on Route 80 once, and it was the scariest experience ever!  We crawled home at 40 mph on a highway that has a 65 mph speed limit.  Grammie named our car "Mantis" because it's so bright green in color! Little did she know that this was an appropriate name for the car.  Continue reading below!

This weekend, we went to out to get pizza at Goodfellas.  The best brick oven pizza!  We order the chicken parmesan pizza.  Delcious!

I was so amazed how big the piece of basil was on the pizza.  Get a load of this!  It was almost as large as a slice of pizza!  Whoa!

After the pizza, we decided to get a beer at the Killmeyer's bier garden.  I love a good German Weisse!

As we were sipping on our beer, this little kitty came through a hole in the fence and hung around enjoying the atmosphere and the live band.  A very chill kitty.

When we left, we got in the car and noticed a huge mantis on the windshield of our car!  This is the first praying mantis I've ever seen in Staten Island.  I told my husband that she must have been attracted to our green car "Mantis".  Our car was like the mother ship calling her in.  She probably thought our green car was a giant plant! 

We had a paper bag in the car, so we scooped her into the bag and transported our little mantis friend to our garden.  We figure it would make a better home here than in the parking lot of some bar!

Critters in New Paltz

Grammie has this cute flower garden in front of her apartment. From her enclosed porch we could see a critter on her dahlia plant. Do you see what it is? Bigify the photo for a closer look.

It's a really cute Praying Mantis. I've never seen one in person before. I was so excited to see this pretty mantis. It was gigantic, at least 4 inches long. She was also brown, not vibrant green. I wondered if maybe she was molting.

Grammie told us that this was the 2nd Praying Mantis that visited her garden this summer. She must have tasty bugs!