Disappearing Lawn
It is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. Just looking out our huge kitchen window at the lawn and it looks like it's wriggling....and if you can remember what it looked like yesterday you also notice that's it's slowly disappearing. Blade by blade.
It is the grasshopper plague.
Seriously, I've never seen anything like it. In short, we've never had anything like it. About three days ago huge clouds of grasshoppers started flying in from the North and settling onto our lawn (which is rather big). There's so many of them that when you look at the ground it appears to be moving (coz' the grasshoppers are brown). Now, three days after they flew in, our lawn has progressed past the stage of "mown" to nearly-not-existing-anymore. In places where the grass used to be thin it's just dirt.
It's just bizarre. Well, probably not actually. Just a smaller scale of the huge grasshopper plagues that you read about in books like the Laura Ingalls Series where they'd fly in and eat the whole wheat crop in just one day. Apparently they were so thick back then that in the middle of the day it would be dark inside the house as if it was dusk. Now that would be an experience!
And I have to admit, we've started eating them....
Okay, I'm half-kidding. To explain: the running dare in this house is to dip a grasshopper in honey and eat it (like John the Baptist did) and quiet naturally whenever anyone got the nerve up to do it there just wasn't a grasshopper to be found anywhere. So they got let off the hook--for the time being.
Then in come all these grasshoppers. Naturally, the dare intensifies and finally a certain mortal decides to take the plunge: one of my younger bros, Josh (13 yrs). Off he goes, and after much pouncing and lamenting catches one. Then with a melodramatic ceremony, dips the unfortunate victim in sticky honey and pops it into his mouth. The verdict? "Kinda crunchy but all I can taste is honey." he reckoned.
Weeeeeeell, if honey was all he was going to taste then that just wasn't good enough for us the viewers who wanted a real show. He now had to eat one plain without anything. Which he did....with sadly no more great results except to gross out Mum by saying, "It's kind of weird, coz' you can feel it wriggling when you're chewing it."
Anyhow, after that all was forgotten for a while, until we had visitors, our cousin Jonathan (who is only really tall and kinda broad but not like a bouncer, Kayci....sadly) and his wife, Sheema. Sheema is Asian and had a friend once who went to Thailand and sent her back photos of how they eat heaps of insects over there. Apparently, the Thai's favourite way of eating grasshoppers is to fry them up with chilli. As it turns out, Sheema is no less a darer than we are and she bagan daring us as a whole to fry up a handful of the abboundance of little hoppers that were overtaking our lawn and eat them. I think I'll just have to say that we're that mentally insane to try it. Like, why not?
Out comes the frying pan. The chilli (alot). And a few unlucky grasshoppers.
And you know what? The whole mentality towards grasshoppers is all phychological. Fried up and covered in chilli it's just like eating the crunchy fins of a fish (did you ever do that as a kid?). You can't taste anything. All there is, is this horrific bang in your mouth from the chilli. lol Though, if you really concentrate you can imagine some kind of chicken flavour.
So seriously, if you ever find yourself marooned on some island and you become bombarded with grasshoppers. Eat them. Fry them up with chilli. It's a lot nicer experience than trying to eat, say, pig brains (something I did whilst I was in Cambodia. Just for the record: DON'T EVER EAT PIG BRAIN! It's revolting.).
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