Thursday, August 30, 2007

Tea and Norman

Lucas and I love going out for tea. More specifically, we enjoy going to the 24hour coffee shop at 0200 and drinking tea. Usually it's nice and relaxing. Honestly, there's very few things that are more relaxing: drinking nice warm tea and reading a good book with someone you love.


This is unless your tea party is crashed by a 4 inch, green praying mantis. Picture it: I was sitting outside, a nice warm summer's eve. Drinking a nice orange herbal tea, reading about Prague. Then... out of no where, I actually HEAR the bug land. THWOMP. I glanced over and there on the table, only inches from my teacup, is a 4 inch (not exaggerating) praying mantis (aka scary looking bug).

I almost screamed like a girl. I think I heard Lucas muffle his fright. We stood up. Staring at our unwelcomed visitor. He seemed harmless enough. Maybe he was just lonely looking for companionship. But I think deep down, he wanted to eat us.

At first we tried to ignore it. Trying to read our books, but watching him out of the corner of our eyes, just in case an attack was near. Then we tried to appreciate it, "look how it moves its head around" (trying to figure out who was going to be tastier). We couldn't kill it... WAY to big. And what if it had back up... Finally after 10 minutes, we decided to leave. We took our tea and left our table to Norman the Praying Mantis. Maybe the next couple drinking tea at his table would be better companions for him.



3 comments:

Suzanne said...

In Portland? Ewww! Nasty bugs like that are supposed to live far, far away!

nro said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
nro said...

how bizarre... we had a praying mantis staring at us the other day when we were moving our patio table (with a glass top)... i almost dropped it, which would have been disastrous, but managed to place it on the ground gently, back away a few feet, and ask greg if they eat people. he said no. how does he know? i'm with you and lucas, he totally looked like he was going to eat me!