Even the kitchen sink

From the catch-all drawer of forgotten or off-topic photos, I rescued the latest additions. Here they are, in random order; there's no unifying theme.

2. Number plate dug out of a garden, long ago, now resting on a household shelf.

Field cricket found dead in the middle of a school classroom the first day back. It's dry, desert-dry miles, in cricket wanderings, from an outside door. She probably died of thirst.

Look for a mature cricket and examine the end of its abdomen. Locate the paired slender appendages protruding backward from the sides of the abdomen; these are called the cerci and function like a pair of backward antennae.
Look between the cerci to see if an unpaired slender ovipositor projects backward from the end of the abdomen, resembling a spear or needle. ... Your cricket is female if the ovipositor is present and male if not. (From Sciencing)

In most of the photos I looked at, the female has one ovipositor. Why did this one have two, I wondered. I looked at her under the microscope; they're definitely twinned; there's a good gap between the shafts.

I found the answer on BugGuide: the shafts stay together while the cricket lives; when she dies, they may separate.

Top view.

From a northern expedition: Amour de Cosmos Creek, from the bridge.

The Steller's Jay is too far away, but I like this photo, anyhow. Sayward Junction farm.

Scraps of lichen on a twig. Near Upper Campbell Lake.

These Cladonia lichens are extremely common, but very difficult to see clearly, even on the ground; they're covered thickly with tiny scales, arranged in dense clusters.

Cement and wood structure, tossed up on the beach, and colonized by barnacles. Sometimes I wonder how they get there, so far from home.

Stone "planks" at the mid-tidal zone. This pattern of beach rock looks almost too regular to be natural.

Another view of the slabs underfoot.

And I had neglected to mention it earlier, but we're halfway through Arachtober already. We've each been posting a spider photo a day since the beginning of the month. These are two tiny ones that turned up behind (and later in) my kitchen sink.

On tap.

Tiny, tiny. On the back side of a clay tile.

And now that the drawer is empty, I'd better grab the camera and head for the beach again.