Loud storms, jumpy dogs and ... is that a hornworm?

Well, I now have two dogs. I am such a sap, but the new dog is a big sweetie. She has really big feet.

She also is deathly afraid of storms. Her previous owner told me she once jumped through a closed window during a storm. The dog, not the owner.

She got pretty scared during that big storm the other night, but I wrapped her up in blankets and sang to her and she calmed down.

That was some storm, wasn’t it? At least it was in my neighborhood. It just sort of came out of nowhere.

I was reading about it on the website of the Phoenix office of the National Weather Service. It said all the ingredients for a storm were there, and it just needed some sort of trigger and that trigger may have been a gravity wave.

Have you ever heard of a gravity wave? Neither had I. I’m still not sure I understand it very well.

Gravity waves can be very hard to detect. They can be caused by air flowing over mountains or imbalances in the atmosphere or some other stuff that interrupts the flow of a fluid — air. For example, when wind hits a mountain it gets forced upward and gets cold and dense. Gravity pulls this dense air down, creating a gravity wave that can throw an otherwise stable atmosphere out of whack. Anyway, I think that’s how it works. Can you tell me where tomato hornworms come from? Are you sure they’re tomato hornworms and not tobacco hornworms? They look a lot alike, and they pretty much eat the same stuff. Tobacco hornworms have red “horns, “and the tomato variety has black ones.

In both cases, the worm comes from a single egg deposited on the underside of a leaf by moth.

For the tomato hornworm, it’s a fives-potted hawk moth, and for the tobacco worm, it’s a sphinx moth.

The caterpillar chews up your tomatoes, eggplants and the like for awhile, then drops to the ground and burrows in. Eventually, it emerges as a moth.