Why There Is No Post Today

Awwww. Poor baby.

I was going to write today about what the grasshoppers have done to my "garden" (ironic quotes intentional). This hot, horrible, unending (have I mentioned hot?) summer has made a mockery of my "gardening" efforts, and the grasshoppers have arrived to add insult to the sun's injury.

I. Hate. Grasshoppers.

I hate their scritchy back legs. I hate the tobacco juice they spit when they're cornered, and if it were only tobacco juice that wouldn't be so bad but heaven knows what it actually is and I don't want to know. I hate the whir I hear when one decides it's just too cool to hop and wants to be known as a GRASSFLYER, and I especially hate that GRASSFLYERS are magnetically drawn toward my face and want to scratch my eyes out with their scritchy back legs. (What? Yes, they do.)

I especially hate what they've done to my poor little struggling flowers. They have snacked on the zinnias as if they were popcorn and the movie was running long.

So I bent down to take a picture of the poor little zinnia above, and suddenly I spotted it.

Ewwww.

Whoa! That's a good-sized grasshopper, and would be a good illustration for this post. I snapped the picture. You know, that really is a gigantic specimen of grasshopper. Maybe I ought to get closer...

Holy cow! Look at the size of that thing!

At that moment I heard the whir of the ginormous grasshopper becoming a ginormous GRASSFLYER.

That was the moment I shrieked like a little girl, made slapping motions around my eyes, dropped the camera, and died.

And that's why there is no post today.