Flashes of Inspiration

A new experience:  Spouse and I finished watching Spiderman for the umpteenth time earlier tonight.  I got up to let Popeye in the house;  more accurately, I got up to persuade Popeye to please vacate his now habitual spot in the garden just outside the back door and to come at least temporarily into the house.  I exhorted him to pee first – he got Spouse up four times last night – and he obliged me, but then cast a disparaging eye over his shoulder and promptly marched around the front of the house, presumably determined to recline once again, in a different garden and under a different bush.

Popper’s intransigence led me to enlist Spouse’s assistance in retrieving our wayward little friend.  She headed on to the front porch and the exclamations began immediately.  I was urged to join her.

In the front yard, there were many, many, many of these, doing what they do – flying around and periodically emitting little, but very bright, bursts of light.  In the moonless darkness of the lawn, with hundreds of the little critters zooming around the vast expanse of air and trees around us, it was like being in the middle of an all-insect Beatles press conference.   The flashes flitted and glittered like so many airborne diamonds, and the only sound was Spouse’s oohing and aahing at our own private light show.

I tried to take pictures – timed exposures with the DSLR, and even some video with the Sony HandyCam on “Nightshot Plus” mode, but I don’t think any of them turned out.  They certainly didn’t capture the moment.

The SFX were pretty good in Spiderman, but the stuff we saw in the movie was handily outdone by the natural light and magic of a few hundred fireflies.