New car, giant caterpillar and battles in Tripoli

Awoke surprised that there was no pain or stiffness in my legs despite the marathon cycle ride yesterday. I did not escape totally unscathed, as I soon found my backside still saddle sore when I sat down on a hard surface. I had had a migraine in the night, which disappeared by after treatment by midday.

Mrs T had discovered a possible car online, to replace our elderly vehicle, and after lunch we set off to Marshalls to try it out. Wheels grind slowly in our household, but today the car we tried, a Honda Jazz, appeared to be ideal and we progressed to initiating a purchase. As if acknowledging imminent retirement, the exhaust on our existing car came off some of its rubber rings, giving a rattle as we made out way back home.

Our neighbours had shown me a giant insect larva, some eight or more centimetres long. It was relatively smooth, white on the underside and dark brown on top, and was armed with a fierce set of manibles. My first thought yesterday was that it was a beetle larva, but an internet search did not find anything similar enough. Today, in a spare five minutes during cooking dinner, I took out my Collin's Guide to Insects and flicked through the image plates and almost immediately found an equivalent, the caterpillar of the Goat moth.

The Goat moth, Cossus cossus, is a large moth, with a wing span up to 96mm. It is so called because of the goat like smell of the caterpillar, which lives for up to five years boring in wood until emerging to pupate in the soil, hatching out in the following year.

In the evening, I watched the DVD version of Dune with Mr T. This was an extended version, as we found out by watching to the bitter end after three and a bit hours! Slow paced, it was still interesting and unintentionally amusing.

Turning on the news afterwards whilst writing up the day's events, I found it dominated by the potential advance of the rebels in Libya into the suburbs of Tripoli. The question is, are Colonel Gaddaffi's days numbered? Is he even still in the Capital?