Of Crickets and Circadas

°o° On this day in 1929 The Skeleton Dance, the first cartoon in the Silly Symphonies series, was released.

I love crickets.

Their gleeful song echoes up the stairwell into my apartment and wafts along on the pine tree scent of the incense I burn every evening. But the flipside (and there always is one, isn’t there?) is that the circadas are so vehemently vociferous and unified in the evening that you actually have to turn up your radio once the sun descends. They’re not that loud at home… maybe it’s the heat?

They have a bunch of new stations on Sirirus that I’m getting acquainted with on my extended travels, and I found one that’s so absolutely perfect for me I can scarcely believe it - Coffee House, which plays nothing but acoustic singer/songwriters. They have everything from unsigned artists to big stars doing acoustic solo renditions of their megahits (yesterday I heard Adam Levine doing “Makes Me Wonder” with shocking adeptness). Fabulous! It took the place of my previous favorite station BBC Radio 1, the best new music from the U.K. direct from London.

I indulged in one of the cool things about being a law student: slipping into the research lab, plucking in the case code for the Jude trial and printing out every single document for free. They also have attorney profiles, so I got to read about where they all went to school and passed the bar and whatnot. Very cool.

This morning that lady from the gym cornered me again and, in front of the entire “group” as we’re called (there’s a pack of us that always go at the same time and kind of hang out together on the machines) said, “Doesn’t Ashley look wonderful?” They all concurred (“the summer’s been good to you”) and I was so mortified I wanted to crawl into my locker and cinch the MasterLock®.

In other local news, everyone will be delighted to learn that I have moved past the almost-felon on to someone in my insurance law class. Guy doesn’t even know I exist, but who cares… sometimes that’s best, I think.