Monday, October 10, 2016

Beetles!

This past Friday afternoon it was warm and sunny. There are four side by side windows in the office where I work that overlook the parking lot. Mid-afternoon I went to get some water from the cooler near the windows and jumped back- there were hundreds of beetles crawling on the windows- a couple on the inside, but the majority of them on the outside. My co-worker ushered the indoor beetles to the next world and then we got busy and forgot about them. This is the time of year we start getting ladybugs in the house and the cats become pointers, freezing and staring at any red or orange round bugs with black polka dots that they see.

Today the majority of those beetles were on the INSIDE of the windows! The first one I saw landed on my desk, freaking me out because I really do not like bugs in my immediate vicinity. I absolutely freak out over spiders (the result of PTSD from a childhood incident when the three of us kids were riding in the back seat of Mom & Dad's car. We'd been to Atkins Fruit Bowl, a farm stand/orchard in Hadley and were coming home through Northampton. As we were traveling down route 5 Dad suddenly starting trying to read the back of his neck and yelled at my sister to stop fooling around. I was sitting behind Mom, Jeff was I  the middle and Lynnmarie was behind Dad. The next thing I knew my brother and sister were literally on my lap and my sister was screaming rather incoherently, pointing at Dad's neck. I looked and saw a fuzzy banana yellow spider, round, about the size of a nickel or maybe even a quarter- it was the biggest, strangest spider I had ever seen!- dancing on the back of Dad's neck. Mom looked, told Dad to just keep driving and not kill us, there was a spider and she'd get it. She took some tissues from her purse, used them to pluck the BEAST off Dad's neck, then unrolled her window and dropped spider and tissues onto the street. None of us uttered a peep about her littering in Northampton. None of us rode very easily in that car the rest of the way home either, on the lookout for any additional furry yellow spiders that might have been in the fruit Mom had bought.)

So-all day long Carmen removed beetles from the windows while I stayed as far away from them as I could get. Ironically there are signs all around town right now for an event called Beatlemania. THOSE Beatles I could cope with. The winged kind with six legs- forget about it!

Yesterday Revere and Riley Beans cornered a lone ladybug in the kitchen doorway. I used a tissue to grab it and threw it out, but turns out I'm no killer. The thing crept out of the tissue. I screamed. John came and removed the ladybug to the outdoors, and the cats went back to napping. The rest of the day I kept scanning the walls, light fixtures and ceilings for ladybugs. There were no more.

All I can think right now is- please, PLEASE, PLEASE don't let there be any of those BIG stink bugs in the house this fall!


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