Imagine with me...
You're happy, it's dark, you're with your homies, chilling, walking around and bumping into each other a little bit. But that's okay because that's how you like it. Plus, there's a chunk of paper egg carton you can hide under. Suddenly, light crashes in on you! The whole roof of your little home lifts off! You and your friends panic! Then over the top of your comforting wall there appears two hideous, blunt beak like things which start to grope about clumsily, trying to snatch someone from your little home! You hope it doesn't catch you! AAAA AAAH AAHHH it got me! You're being LIFTED SO HIGH YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE THE GROUND FROM HERE AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!! Oh! Hey! It's warm! And moist and dark! But still pretty weird and scary and your friends are nowhere. You'll still wiggle some, because it is kind of cramped. Can't an arthropod get enough room to turn around in? What's that? Is that wind? Oh, nope. Wait, it is! Lots of wind! Oh dang, there's a hurricane wind blowing over you, and even hunkered down you can feel yourself being lifted away from the soft surface your claws can't quite grip! You're being sucked towards a hole in this warm moist dark room! There's no way you'll fit and POW!!!! You're shot like a projectile from a cannon out into the air! You're spinning! Your compound eyes can't focus on anything farther than a few feet away, so you can't see anything at all besides blobs of light and dark! But you're spinning every which way, so it doesn't really matter. And then you crash into the ground, which, thanks to the fact that strength goes up with the square of your cross section, while weight goes up with the cube, you don't suffer any injury at all. And you can see stuff again. It's fuzzy and brown, and there's nothing at all to hide under, but that you can handle. Until WHAM! A hand claps down over you, and you're returned to the container with all your other cricket buddies.
Yes, people, yesterday at Young Life Club, i led and participated in a cricket spitting contest. I told a more animated version of that story at work today, and received many odd looks for my trouble.
And Houston went to Craig's Cruisers with his aunt and uncle, and Karen spent some gift certificate money on new clothes, leaving me home with Zane and Katrina. They can be so well behaved together. It's awesome.