Cicadas Are Coming

The Los Angeles Times reported Friday on the Midwest's coming crop of cicadas.

Normally, this would be the beginning of the busy season at Jim Nadeau's ice-sculpting company.

But when the phone rings, Nadeau tells confused Chicago-area brides and party planners that they might want to postpone their events. "The cicadas are coming!" he tells them."

You don't know how disgustingly bad they can be," said Nadeau, 53, who has been carving ice figures for 27 years in Forest Park, Ill."

The last time they were here, I watched one of my simple swans at a wedding reception get covered with these black, crawling bugs — and the swan was sitting in the middle of the food table," Nadeau said. " The swan was 4 feet tall and weighed 300 pounds."

In the coming days, the cicadas — with their orange eyes and inch-long bodies — are expected to swarm sections of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin for their breeding season.

After the bugs emerge from the soil and shed their exoskeletons, the males emit a sound to attract females. The tone, a cross between a whirring blender and a motorcycle engine, can reach 90-plus decibels.

Adult cicadas live above ground for two to six weeks.

Articles like this make me SO GLAD my mom and I aren't starting our trip in the Midwest. Bugs are exceedingly creepy. Swarms of shrieking bugs are horrible beyond words.

Those of you in the path of the Marauding Cicadic Hordes have my sympathy, but that sympathy is not vast enough for me to want to come and share it with you personally during your time of need.

Sorry....