Bugs!
We suffered a major insect invasion last night. No, I'm not talking about ants. The ants have been living here as long as we have, if not longer. We try to discourage them, washing down the kitchen with soap and bleach water twice a week. But it seems like as soon as we have finished hosing things down, the Lewis and Clark ants set out to blaze new trails in the wilderness. No, these bugs were not our familiar friends. These were new bugs, about half an inch long with wings about twice that length. (The wings seemed to pop off quite easily, as i suspect they were designed to do.) We had about a million of them show up right after dinner.Okay, maybe not a million. But certainly a few thous-, er, hundred, okay, it seemed like a hundred but it was probably closer to dozens... well, one dozen, maybe, but I'm sure eight of them got into the apartment, for crying out loud! And they buzzed against the light and one landed on the Mid-Autumn fruit and one snuck beneath the refrigerator and probably left behind bug cigarette butts and they all definitely were laughing at me...
Sigh. Okay, deep breath. Here's what happened. We were washing up the supper dishes--Yau Neih washing and I drying. Since I was drying, my attention was able to wander all over the place and I noticed some activity outside the window. It looked like the resident spiders (I love spiders. Spiders are my friends.) had reaped a bountiful harvest and had two (I thought) small dragonflies wiggling in their webs. I stoically accepted this insectoid tragedy of nature when I noticed a number of other long-winged insects bumping against our screen. Then I noticed that they were crawling on our screen. Then I noticed that the stupid screen had a big, honkin' gap between it and the window (who designs these things?) and that one of the stupid bugs had gained entrance into the kitchen and that more were crawling towards the gap. My "flight-or-fight" instinct must be a bit defective, because while I successfully released my pent-up fury at the initial intruder and dealt it the full might of my dish towel, I then spent the next few crucial seconds watching the subsequent immigrants venture into my domicile.
Fortunately, that invasion brought some more sense to my brain, because I quickly closed the sliding door between the kitchen and the rest of the apartment. (Or maybe Yau Neih did that. It all blurs together.) I then commenced to smacking and cracking, leaving long bug wings scattered all over. Somewhere in there I started thinking about the source of the problem. The crux of it was that in order to close the window, you needed to open the screen. See what I mean about the design? Anyway, I ended up snapping my finger against the screen to knock away the remaining bugs, then hurriedly opened the screen and slammed shut the window. All that remained then was to hunt down the remaining invaders and to sweep up the bug corpses. (Not that they were all corpses--some of them were still wiggling.) The next time, I said to myself, I'll be better prepared.
Unfortunately, that turned out to be five minutes later. The window in the girls' bedroom was the exact same model as that in the kitchen and the bug party had simply moved itself next door. At least three bugs had gained access before I could repeat my window closing procedure. One I caught in flight, the other two I dispatched while they were crawling, having apparently discarded their wings.
So, we went to bed with all the windows sealed shut. Ga Dai, having been raised on Ranger Rick and Your Big Backyard, being slightly irritated with me and my savage ways.
posted by John @ 4:25 PM
<< Home