I Google absolutely everything from recipes, to information about things I photograph, to travel, to home remedies, to product reviews, to books, to sports, to photography tips, to settling arguments with hubs … you name it, I’ll Google it.

I’ve often commented that I don’t recall much of what life was like before Google. Did we all just walk around satisfied with whatever information we had?

I know some had encyclopaedias at home (we didn’t) and almost everyone had access to libraries. The thing is, those things weren’t available everywhere we went, or at the spur of the moment, so we must have just accepted whatever knowledge we had and we mustn’t have had as much urgency to find answers “right now”.

Yesterday afternoon was beautiful and I wanted to enjoy reading out on our balcony, but the flies were absolutely wicked, as they always are at this time of year.

I didn’t have any bug spray on hand, so I consulted Google for what things would repel flies. Two things that came up on several sites was that flies hate cinnamon and cayenne pepper.

I happened to have both on hand, so I placed cinnamon sticks at various strategic spots around my balcony and armed myself with a spray bottle that contained the magic recipe of 1tsp of cayenne pepper mixed in 1 cup of water.

I’m here to tell you that Canadian flies laugh and flex their muscles at such folly. They gathered on the cinnamon sticks and had a jolly old time log rolling. The cayenne spray shooed them away for a few seconds but I’m sure they rallied their troops in protest and returned tenfold.

I finally waved my white flag of retreat and returned to the great bugless indoors.

Photo Note: Because I truly believed it might work, I snapped my feature photo before the flies gathered to frolic on the cinnamon stick. I wasn’t able to catch a photo of them on it because by the time they arrived, I was too busy trying to spray them. In hindsight I thought a shot of the flies on the cinnamon would have told the story without much explanation needed. My feature photo is “as shot” in portrait mode.

“The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose.”

Arthur Schopenhauer