Cicada Update

My count continued over the weekend:

• Saturday, May 22, saw a bunch: 1 flying outside the door as Andrew left in the morning; 8 on my errands into Vienna; another 9 while running errands with Andrew. Total: 18
• Sunday, May 23, the count officially comes to an end. When I went out to get our bikes out of the shed, I saw a dried out cicada outer shell hanging on the door of our fence (not sure what it’s called, but when they crawl out of the ground, they generally attach themselves to a nearby tree and they develop an hard outer shell which they then shed).

  I screamed, and then calmed down a bit, until I looked over and saw two more shells on the fence, and a cicada. Andrew came over to see what was wrong, and then sighed, “This is going to be a long bike ride, isn’t it?”

  We got the bikes out, drove up to the W&OD trail, where more cicadas attached themselves to our bikes and then flew away.

  I stopped counting when I got to a bazillion. At that point, it’s really not useful to count anymore.^*

Here are a couple of the shedded-shells on our fence:
   

The sound of the cicadas is becoming annoying. There are so many of them that in the background it sounds like the hum of phaser fire, but it’s not intermitent — it’s constant during the daytime. I work in a trailer, and I start to hear the cicada drone about 10-15 feet before I get to the outside door. I just imagine that when I get out I’m going to see the horizon glowing red from the alien phasers that are surely razing the city.

^* A bazillion is mathematically like infinity. A bazillion plus one is still a bazillion. In fact, a bazillion plus a bazillion is still a bazillion. So, counting beyond a bazillion is just silly. (And I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Math to prove it.)