AJ is on another knock-knock joke kick. Mostly he�s obsessed with the format of my favorite knock-knock joke:

Knock knock
Who�s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interrupting cow wh�
MOO!

AJ is trying to find other possibilities for interruption. We�ve gone through a slew of animals:

Interrupting shee�.BAAAA!
Interrupting do�WOOOF!
Interrupting tig�.ROOAAARR!
Interrupting b�BUUZZZ!
Interrupting mosquito�.OUCH! (This breaks the format slightly, but we don�t care)

Lately he�s moved onto other things.

Interrupting refrigerat�.HUMMM!
Interrupting backpa�..ZZZZIP!
and my personal favorite (his too, I think)
Interrupting electric guit�BEEAOW!

The last one is accompanied by a hand gesture that looks vaguely like a hard guitar strum, except that it takes place so high in the air that AJ must be holding his invisible guitar somewhere between his nose and earlobes.

* * * * *
Maybe it was yesterday�s firefly encomium and your responses to it that has made me particularly attuned to the insect population today, but it seems like the air is full of butterflies. I counted seven different species hovering around my front porch early this afternoon. Several ruby-throated hummingbirds were also hovering close by. Apparently my attempts to lure the creatures to the yard have been successful. There has been less spraying for gypsy moths this year and it shows. There has been a butterfly explosion.

I have been cultivating a bed of milkweed in the traffic island opposite our house, among the more formal arrangement of hostas. My husband and I went out there to weed this afternoon and I found piles of fuzzy tiger-striped caterpillars, the early manifestations of monarch butterflies, huddling around the base of the plants and hanging from the bottoms of their leaves.

One of our neighbors stopped to warn us, rather fanatically, not to pull up the milkweed, not knowing that I am equally fanatic about butterflies. Besides, how could I mistake something that smells like lilacs for a weed destined for the compost heap?

I�m fairly certain that it�s only a short time before I become totally eccentric and repair to a shack on a hill to keep bees. It seems like a fitting activity for my retirement.

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