Cherry is really into composting, which should not be a surprise, given that her primary avocation (other than raising a revenge-driven adolescent) is gardening and landscaping. This week she showed up at Planet Pancake to beg food scraps from proprietor Jeanette. This included a mini-lecture to Jeanette on composting. Jeanette managed to make it through the talk without falling over, unconscious.

Cherry then admitted that her real purpose was to satisfy a requirement from Violet Cheshire and the Sunny Soleil Society. That was to gather a quota of organic matter for composting in order to obtain their financial backing for Cherry to attend a composting convention (say, can you dig it?!?). But then Cherry spilled the beans to Jeanette that the Society was also getting a tax break for the support, which she was not supposed to reveal to anybody.

Frankly, I don’t know what the big deal is; tax breaks are as common as tax cheats. Nevertheless, Cherry did break the trust, which is certainly going to come back and cause trouble. What a family the Trails are:  Mark will break the law when he thinks it helpful; Rusty wants to take revenge against a classmate for duping him; and Cherry can’t keep a trust.

An interesting, if slightly oversold topic on spider ballooning. What Mark talks about (flying on electro-magnetic currents in the air) is still a hypothesis in the scientific community, but it has been demonstrated in the lab. It’s still being tested and evaluated. The reasons for why certain species of spiders (mostly, but not exclusively, young) wind up ballooning are varied.

Survival is one big reason, for sure. It’s important to realize that spiders have virtually no control over where or how far they will go. Most flights do not seem to be very long. Interestingly, back on October 31, 1832, Charles Darwin spotted and captured spiders that had ballooned onto the HMS Beagle some 60 miles from shore. He called them Aeronaut spiders.