Did everyone have a good holiday, no matter which side of the lake you're on?
Our town celebrates with a four-day arts and crafts festival, which encompasses the weekend. There's usually a parade on July 1st with an impressive display of fireworks on the beach at night.
At one time the festival was free, although I vaguely remember one of the service clubs passing around a hat at the beach during the fireworks. But as it grew over the years, slowly but surely it became more commercialized until last year when we were charged admission even to wander amongst the vendors who set up their wares amongst the trees in front of the bandshell. I'm sure if they thought they could have got away with it they'd be charging admission to the fireworks themselves.
I used to go to the festival every year, a couple of times I even paid to go into the crafts enclosure down at the harbour. If nothing else I'd go down and have a look at the paintings in the art tents which were, surprisingly, free. But once they started charging a fee to get in to see the regular vendors ... well, that was it for me. This year they didn't even have the art tents because the price they charged for the booths was so high there weren't enough artists ready to take the chance that they'd make their money back.
We haven't even been going down to the fireworks these last few years, but I'm sure that'll change once the Granddaughter is a little older. :-D
I don't know if you're aware of it, but my buddy Jamie DeBree is writing three serial stories simultaneously. Actually, she's writing six, and if you sign up for her newsletter you'll get new installments emailed to you each month, but her blog stories are updated each Friday. They are: Live With Me, in which calm, cool, Candace is trying way too hard to resist the hunk she had a crush on in high school when his mother tricks her into giving him a place to stay so he can recuperate from a sports injury. Or if that's a little too tame for you, there's Double Blind, where Emily is offered the chance for double her pleasure, blindfolded, by two men at sea. And for something completely different, there's Dry Rain, a terrifying tale of nature gone wrong.
And one of the coolest things about these serials, aside from the stories themselves, is that if you've missed an episode or need to get caught up, you can just email Jamie and let her know. She'll take care of it. :-)
Dry Rain really creeps me out, especially since we once had a moth infestation in our house. And the only thing worse than those damnable moths that got into everything were their larva. Ugh! But that's the nature of insects, isn't it? And Jamie's story is made all the worse by the thought that maybe something like this could happen. The planet is changing, and mother nature is fighting back.
I'm not just talking about the obvious changes, like the change in weather patterns, the melting of the polar ice caps, fires, floods, and earthquakes. I'm talking about the little changes, like the coyotes moving into our neighborhood, or the migration of insects.
When I was a kid we used to go up north to Owen Sound quite a lot. One of the things they had up there that we didn't, was earwigs. Here's what they look like:
Apparently it's just an old wives tale that they got their name from burrowing into people's ears, although there have been cases where they've been found in a person's ear canal. But slowly the earwigs started moving south and they've been the scourge of our household just as they'd been my aunt's. Here's the thing though. As the earwigs became more numerous in our area, they began disappearing from my aunt's area. Coincidence? Or are they just better at dealing with them?
And is it just me, or are the spiders getting bigger and more numerous?
A few weeks ago the hubby and I noticed we'd gotten bites we'd never had before. They kind of looked like mosquito bites, but they were red and raised a welt, and they were still there a couple of weeks later. We suspect they might be black fly bites, but we've never had black flies in our area before, you have to go further north for them. Looks like the black flies are moving in.
Now. Go read Jamie's story and get ready for the moth infestation. ;-)
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