Summer of the Cicada's (kind of).

This is the summer of the cicada's. These little, slightly ugly, critters eat roots and stuff under the ground for 17 years. Then they crawl to the surface, crawl up the nearest tree, make some annoying noises, mate, law some eggs, then die. All of this for a little procreation (a slight understatement--they do lay a few hundred eggs). We actually had a few bugs that were early birds come last year.

I was going to let this little guy die and then send him to my niece (who likes bugs). Due to guilt, however, I thought, "I'll let this guy go in our front yard and just send some cicada's that are already dead." I walked to the balcony and let him fly off. We watched him fly around for a bit. The next thing we knew, a sparrow zoomed in and and plucked him out of the sky and ate him. So much for guilt....

Close-up Invasion

Here is a closer shot of some of the cicada's

Cicada love

This is what it looks like when these little guys emerge.

This is our favorite street entertainer in Chicago. Well, alright, he's really not an entertainer as much as he is entertaining . He is hilarious. He is a street preacher who talks into his microphone and the sound comes out all distorted on his megaphone. When I was standing by him the other day, he was saying, "If you smoke, you ain't goin' to heav'n. God don't like cigarettes. The devil wants you to smoke. You can smoke all you want in hell." (The irony is that the guy sounds like he's been smoking since he went off baby formula.)

I went incognito (I dressed up like a pigeon and acted like I was picking at a Burger King wrapper) and made some audio recordings of the guy. If I can figure out how to upload those, we will post them with this post.