It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a… crane fly???

They look like giant mutant mosquitoes, and we initially referred to them as “those monster mosquitoes”.

But we soon learned that they’re officially known as crane flies, and they’re actually quite harmless. In fact, they’re not exactly the most intelligent of creatures and are very easy to catch.

The truth is that I don’t remember ever seeing them until about 8-9 years ago – i.e. a few years after we made aliyah.

But then one Purim, they suddenly appeared.

And they were all over the place. Literally. That first year, there were swarms of them in shul on Purim night. (At that time, our shul building was under construction, and the interim structure’s windows had no screens.)

Although their numbers have decreased significantly since then, the crane flies reappear like clockwork every Purim and stick around until Pesach-time. (The kids now call them “Purim Flies”.)

That’s all very interesting, I can hear you say. But why are you blogging about them now?

Good question.

The first – and obvious – reason is that when one’s looking for excuses to avoid Pesach cleaning, any blog topic is welcome.

Yet the real impetus for this post was an incident which occurred earlier this evening here in TRLEOOB*. When a certain Shiputzim daughter went to brush her teeth, she was dismayed to discover a crane fly swirling around the bathroom.

As you can imagine, high jinks ensued.

But YZG quickly removed the offending creature from the premises; the Shiputzim daughter in question was able to brush her teeth; and I headed to the computer to bang out this post….

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* TRLEOOB = the real life equivalent of our blog