OK, I'm in the middle of a seventy-hour week at work right now, so the kitchen has been pretty quiet. One thing I did have time to do was put together a couple of fruit fly traps. The little buggers started popping up last week despite the fact that we've had no actual fruit outside the fridge for ages. They seem fond of the sourdough starter, even though it is covered by both a lid and a cloth.

I followed these instructions on Instructables for both a soap bubble trap and an inverted cone trap. I put them out last night and this evening there are several dozen flies in there, mostly in the inverted cone trap. Several dozen. Where did they come from? I can see why classical thinkers believed in spontaneous generation - except my theory would have to be the fruit flies arise from the smell of sourdough starter alone.