Why It's a Wooly Bear!

My favorite guess was a "fuzzy wuzzy" for what it was!

It is, in fact, commonly known as a Wooly Bear caterpillar.  There is a scientific name of course which I could Google and easily find out, but it's not cute and no one around here calls them by their scientific name anyway.  Everyone calls them Wooly Bears.  And in case you didn't know, the Wooly Bear caterpillar is rumored to predict the severity of the coming winter.  However, that is probably untrue.  But it's fun to believe!  :-)

Here's an amusing article from the Farmer's Almanac about the beloved caterpillar.  In the late fall they're all over the place where I live, and they're large enough to be seen on the road when you're driving along.  Of course I always try to avoid them!  I mowed the lawn for the last time about a week ago and I moved three of them off my driveway into the woods for safety.  I'm not big on picking up creepy crawly things, but these are darn cute, and yes, quite fuzzy wuzzy.  When you pick them up they get scared and curl up into a little ball.  If you wait a minute, they get their courage up and then they'll stretch back out and tickle your hand with all those little tiny footsteps. 

On another note, I posted a bit back that I was going to work on our family genealogy.  Well I got Family Tree Maker and it's become like a sickness.  Like some have an addiction to shoes or bottle caps or Harley parts, now I can't stop searching about my family.  I can't stop.  It's like, "Well, let me just try one more search here...", or, "let me just search for this one other name...".  I don't have a subscription to Ancestry.com (which has a lot of info but you have to pay), so that is at least limiting me!  Or it's making it worse.  I'm not sure which... My side of the family is from eastern Europe, so that makes it challenging I think, but very interesting.  The borders have changed so many times I don't even always know what country to search under!
  

The end.