Bugs and more

It's been awhile since I've posted bug photos and AboutAmherst's resident entomologist's analysis. He keeps getting questions -- from our friend Alison about this cave cricket, for instance, but I've been focusing on cute creatures instead.

Like this possibly incompetent -- or overly confident -- watch-cat in a Shelburne Falls bookstore.

Brian advises doing nothing about cave crickets, which like to hide under things in dark, cold places. But I noticed a blogging exterminator, who casts a colder eye on cave crickets and their ilk, suggests building homemade traps for them with a shoebox and sticky paper.
Diana, our artist friend from Ohio, sent this charming photo. Says Brian: "It's a squash vine borer. They are neat, as a moth that mimics wasps. The larvae can damage or kill a squash plant but usually are not common enough to be a big problem, not usually worth trying to control."

Although a person could cut them out of the stems where they bore, if you just have a small number of plants, he said.
Ewweeee! is it hot here in Amherst! Our thermometer says it's 100 degrees, although that's a bit of an exaggeration; the official temperature here is 98! Yesterday, it reached 97 and the record for the day here was 96 in 1949, according to weather.com.

Brian and I are dreaming of taking a vacation in Iceland this summer!

I have something like this in mind -- an 1883 Montreal ice palace.

In the meantime, we've been visiting some of our favorite summer spots, such as the Shelburne Falls Bridge of Flowers.

And getting around to some classic parades. I particularly liked this guy, who marched in Chesterfield's parade, an Amherst performance mime named Christopher Yerlig.

And then there were these two clowns at the Amherst parade -- JUST KIDDING, they're my friends Nick Grabbe and Larry Kelley.