I know, I should be packing, but the amatuer naturalist in me is continually distracted and inspired by the many wonders (and the occasional atrocity!) of the environment around me. The sheer diversity and entertainment to be found in the ecology present in our own backyard never fails to amaze or entertain me.
The young lady pictured below is about an inch and a half long, and is unquestionably looking directly at the camera. Soon after I took this photo, she tried to remind her paparazzo that he had better things to be doing with his time than harassing a hard-working woman, but she failed to discourage me. She might be known to you by her common names as a "digger wasp", or a "cricket hawk". It probably belongs to the "thread-waisted" family of wasps, the Sphecidae, who have graced these pages before.
A casual google image search reveals that she probably belongs to genus Sphex, but I hesitate to stand more decisively on this point without actually keying the critter out on a reliable document published by a reputable author after a process of peer reivew. Still, she certainly does possess many of the key diagnostic characteristics common to her family of wasp. Most notable among these features are the constricted waist, "simple" unbranched hairs on the thorax, and a pronotal "collar" that fails to reach the tegula - the "shoulders" of the wings.
Sphecids are far more interesting for their behavioral characteristics than for their morphology. They flick their wings constantly as they go about their business, and it gives them an odd sense of purpose. As solitary wasps, they spend most of their adult lives serving as pollinators while feeding on the nectar of flowers - a basal behavior that would become emphasized in their descendants, the bees. Of course, reproduction and growth require large amounts of protein for a developing organism - and as a result, these solitary wasps are also incredibly predaceous.
Their predatory behavior can be every bit as elaborate and complex as those of the so-called "higher" vertebrates. Studies on the bee-wolves earned Niko Tinbergen his doctorate, as he established that even creatures as "neurologically simple" as insects were capable of learning sophisticated behaviors, including a positional awareness that allowed them to remember and use distinct landmarks to find their nesting place. Selection has encouraged the evolution of this memory as sphecids drop out of the sky to sting their prey of choice with an immobilizing venom, and then drag them away to an underground chamber they have constructed. The manner in which a given wasp drags or carries its prey away can also be species-specific, and the emerald cockroach wasp, Ampulex compressa, is infamous for its brain-surgery on its host of choice, the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana.
I observed my little girl drag several crickets into that burrow over the next several hours, paralyzed but alive - where they will meet their final grisly fate. That tomb is also a birthing chamber, and once each underground cell is provisioned, the female will lay a single egg on each. Her offspring will eventually hatch, and then slip inside their host, ghoulishly devouring its internal organs - or living like tiny vampires on the blood of their host. You're still alive while they eat you...
It seems that on my way back from the grocery store, I blew out a tire. This is quite a blowout. I must have run over a piece of metal from the numerous construction projects out here. I am only thankful that it happened as I drove back into the complex, and not somewhere considerably farther up the road. I've had to empty the trunk of the carload of things I plan on taking back into storage just to get the spare tire and jack out. It'll be fixed soon enough, and then I'll go buy me a new tire. 
