You know how in some neighborhoods you'll be walking under a tree and it'll feel like you're being showered with dew in the middle of the day? And how, at the exact same moment, your feet feel like they're sticking to the ground? I found out recently that it's not water or sap falling from those trees, but the excrement of tiny aphids, and that the city actually has an incredibly awesome method of getting rid of them.
Enter Mike, the city worker dude who pulled up in front of my house last week in a truck towing this thing...
I had a lot of questions for him and I wasn't truly convinced that he was telling me the truth at first because he told me that the thing was actually a snow maker and that he was there to spray aphids out of the trees with a mixture of soap and water. But his assistant opened up the fire hydrant on the corner...
Then they filled the thing up with water and soap, for reals...
I didn't see them at work that day but I googled the machine and it IS a snow machine, and I saw them spraying the trees a couple days later, and the stickiness under the trees magically stopped the next day.
TOTALLY AWESOME!
