Grave of the Fireflies

No, not the heartbreaking animated movie of starvation in postwar Japan. Maybe a more accurate title would be "Some graves and some fireflies." But where's the poetry in that?

We went hunting for fireflies in the local cemetery again. Lily got so excited. She asked me to take a picture in her firefly catching outfit. Her wish is my command.


She's picky as only little kids can be about her costume. It had to be this shirt with the glow in the dark dragonflies, this pair of shorts, these little black dress shoes, these hair clips, that hair band and of course her butterfly catching net.

The cemetery is nice. (But then again, I'm partial to cemeteries). It's a fine and private place (as it were) that's ostensibly still open for business, but seems to have seen its heyday during the Spanish American war. I think the most recent year of death I've seen on a tombstone was from the 1970s.

(I wasn't kidding about the Spanish-American war. It's a running joke between Jen and me that there seems to be a disproportionate percentage of veterans from that war buried in this cemetery)

Lily had a blast. She was running everywhere waving her net, completely heedless of where she was going. I thought she was going to run after a firefly and wind up with a bruise that read "Flynn" or "McDermott" on her face. Jen summed it up exactly, "A lot of days the parenting gig is not what we imagined. THIS however, is EXACTLY what being a parent should be like every day." I took a little video of it on my phone. It's pretty dark, and I was going to edit it to improve it, but apparently my phone films in a format my freebie movie editing program can't handle. So just fiddle with the gamma on your monitor if you're going to watch it.

While we're on the subject of bugs and videos, our Wacky Wednesday movie was A Bug's Life, which was fairly good. Pixar films are generally pretty awesome (except for Cars, which was fucking dreadful) , but this seemed somehow incomplete. It was almost like "Proto-Pixar", as if they were still refining the tropes that would come to characterize their movies, even though it came after Toy Story, which is as Pixarish as movie as there ever was. I wish it were a little more little kid friendly. It seemed every few minutes, one bug or another was saying kill this or die that, and we didn't want to set Lily off. She seemed more or less oblivious to that, though. She liked it. Her favorite characters were the pillbugs. She really likes pillbugs (aka Roly Poly) . She had a couple in a little container, which she brought inside the house to show me. Then she promptly dropped it and spilled them all out. I think we got all of them, but at night I have nightmares of Ohmu growing in my walls.

Bonus! Names for pillbugs by region