shad
The phone will not stop ringing at the office. This is the first period of
relative calm I've had since I got here over an hour ago. My desk is awash in
a sea of paper, and I fully expect to be interrupted any minute with another
telephone call.
But it's good to be busy.
In other news, I know it makes me a lame Canadian, but I did enjoy today's
Questionable
Content, purely because big shot American cartoonist decided to mention
our widdle country. I always get a kick out of stuff like that. Although it
makes me nervous that he's figured out our secret strategy . . .
It's also shadfly season in the Village. We're very close to the Ottawa River
here, and I guess the shadflies think this is close enough when they travel
away from the water to moult or mate or die or whatever it is they do. I
remember this from my grandmother's cottage on the Ottawa River, back when I
was a child. The shadflies would simply attach themselves to any vertical
surface, so basically, the walls, windows, and screens outside the house, and
then one day only their skins would be left. Very interesting process.
Because they attached themselves to the screens at my grandmother's cottage,
the skin's legs would get stuck in the holes of the screen and the skins would
stick around for a while before they eventually fell off or disintegrated.
Here, there are no screens, so every day there less and less of them as the
skins lose their grip on whatever surface they're attached to. But you should
have seen it yesterday! There were literally THOUSANDS of shadflies attached
to every single building in the village. It looked like we'd been infested
with some kind of locust plague. Neat stuff.
Posted by Ally at June 15, 2006 09:39 AM