Yesterday I visited my sister and her surgery-recovering husband and found out one of the big reasons he was sent home so fast. Apparently the doctors consider risk of infection as so high that they see getting him out of the hospital — away from all those other ill people and institutional germs — as a big plus. My sister said that was the major reason for home visits by the physical therapist, too, not so much to save on the wear and tear of transporting him but to limit his contact with people at this early healing stage. I started to wonder about how many homes the therapist would have visited before arriving, bringing germs from those… but my sister told me infection control studies show this is a better option.

So I told her I washed before coming over.

At the laundromat the previous night, something ugly was there: cicadas clinging to the outside of the windows. They were attracted to the lights, and several flew in the door when people went in and out. This caused me and two other women to scream each time it happened. Cicadas are so big, and when you try to brush them away from the door they made that horrible buzzing noise like an angry old alarm clock.

I guess they were dying, and that’s why they weren’t up in the treetops like normal. But they were very creepy. The staff of this laundromat will have to contend with a bunch of cicadas sitting up in the lights later on. Or maybe they’ll find their gross corpses on the floor one morning.

Maybe the heat brought the bugs around, because there were some other big weird insects on the windows too. Then there was a long rainstorm last night, which broke the heat for a while.