����Today I became a woman! Um, well, that's not actually true but I've *always* wanted to write that in a diary, so why not this one, eh?

����Actually, today I ate bugs, which takes one entry off my life "to do" list. I gotta admit that it wasn't at the *top* of that list (let's see, there's "win the Nobel Prize for Literature", "star in Broadway musical", "become irresistable Love Goddess") but hey, you take what you can get.

����Now I know that at this point you are asking yourself, "*How* did she come to eat bugs?" I'm glad you raised that question because I was finding it hard to segue back to that line of thought, what with all my digressions and all.

����The eating bugs thingie was a shared mother/daughter experience. See, my kidlet mentioned that for the next few weeks they're setting butterflies free at the Botanical Gardens in Montreal and hey, mom, she said, said she, they're also offering bug snacks.

����Woo HOO!!!! Eye candy *and* taste treats-- be still my beating heart.

����Well, first let me tell you that everyone else in Montreal shared our fascination with eating creepy crawlies. So much so that we spent nearly two hours lined up at the Insectarium for the experience. But most of them, when faced with the grubby reality, wimped out.

����Not your correspondent and the Girl Wonder, though. Nuh uh. WE took our Morroccan cricket, our Chinese scorpion, our ant sushi, and our assorted grub and worm like critters and by God we tried them all.

����It's hard to describe the mix of revulsion and wonder I felt eating my first bug, a hapless Moroccan cricket that had been fried in some way. Crunchy on the outside, still creamily good on the inside, tasted somewhat like a peanut.

����Ants are equally crunchy but not much in the taste department. The worms/grubs were not particularly flavourful, either. But the scorpions ... man oh man the Szechuan scorpions were wonderfully good and I recommend the next time you're in a bug restaurant that you go for the Chinese scorpions. Take it from me, you *won't* be disappointed.

����Well, diary dear, that's about all. Time to make a cup of tea and curl up with my book.