Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Hot and Icky

So, despite being aware of the imminent arrival of numerous cicadas yesterday and today, I decided *not* to mow the lawn this past weekend.

And, now I just get off the phone with My Lady and she says I need to sweep the sidewalk in front of the house when I get home, because there are so many bugs on it.

If there are that many cicadas on the sidewalk, there will be double that in each square foot of our yard.

It is going to be one hot, icky grass trimming tonight.

5 comments:

Johnny Yen said...

To quote my late friend Mark, "Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow."

Joe said...

My anticipation continues to rise. No sign of them here yet. The one figure I've seen says upland wooded areas can expect 130,000 per acre.

Splotchy said...

JY, I went ahead and dood it (with gardening gloves on, though).

The front yard was pretty thick with them, though I think it was mostly the skins, not live ones (though I think a killed a bug or two).

I heard that Elmhurst and Brookfield have seen the most hot cicada action as of yet.

Bubs, I think with those kinda numbers you should be having a barbecue. I'll bring the beer if you bring the bugs.

Mob said...

Forgive what is possibly a stupid question...

Locusts and cicadas, are these one and the same? I've never heard of anyone in our area (West Texas) talk of cicadas, but we have locusts each summer, complete with the weird husks they emerge from, and the constant burring noise of them singing in the trees.

Maybe I slept through this day in science, along with 'your ass and a hole in the ground: a comparitive study'.

Splotchy said...

Here's a pretty small but good webpage describing the differences.

http://www.lcfpd.org/html_lc/cicadas/cicadas.html

Apparently early settlers called them locusts because they were freaked out by all these bugs coming out of the earth -- thought they were a Biblical plague.