After Meg and Jake’s somewhat relaxed weekend with family and friends, they are back at work.  Meg is working crazy hours for a couple of months so she asked me to take primary responsibility for the blog in her absence.

All is not lost.  She did contribute a great photograph of a locust she took here in Kansas City with her Olympus camera. The scientific name for the locust is “cicada” or even more technical “cicadodea”.  But we all know them as locusts.  Whether cicadodea, cicada, or locust, it is, apparently, among the most widely recognized of all insects.

Shakespeare might have said, “a cicada by any other name” is still a funny looking creature.  So is its shell!