Rip Aches, Insect Killer

As usual, I’m going about 35 miles an hour on the Information Superhighway.  I recently replaced the stereo in my car (which only had a tape player) with one with a fancy CD player. Now it also came with all kinds of things I don’t understand like Bluetooth and Pandora which I am sure I will get around to figuring out how to use one of these days, a week or so before they become obsolete.  But right now I am just happy to be listening to music of my own choosing and audio-books of titles that I never get around to reading.

Right now, I’m listening to Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith.  This novel has an interesting premise – and I hope I’m not giving too much away here – that Abraham Lincoln was driven by a single-minded obsession with hunting and slaying vampires.  The sheer number of vampires who populated America according to this novel is kind of mind-boggling, like all those people who turn out to actually be Wesen on an episode of Grimm.

I kind of relate to Lincoln.  Of course, I have never encountered a vampire, that I know of, but my world has been populated with any number of creepy, crawly, and sometimes flying creatures who must be eliminated.  Yes, I would wager a guess that in real life undesirable insects greatly outnumber both vampires and Wesen. 

Unlike Lincoln I do not hunt insects.  As long as I don’t actually see them, I am more than happy to live and let them live.  I am, in fact, the very picture of laissez-faire when it comes to the unseen insect, or even those seen in the great outdoors.  However, once they show up on my “turf” (i.e. inside my home or office space) they just have to go.  Never mind that some of them are supposedly harmless.  They all multiply, and we simply can’t have that. 

I never needed any special weapons like Lincoln required with his vampires.  I just basically smash the bugs with whatever is nearby.  Then those pesky stink bugs made their unsightly appearance.  You can’t just kill these bugs because they emit a ghastly odor if you do that will only attract more of them.  Hmm, getting rid of these little critters required a vacuum cleaner or a toilet, but I adapted.

Fearlessly, I continue to deal with the critters who come my way.

Wait, I think I hear my husband yelling something like, “What do you mean, ‘fearlessly’?”  He is undoubtedly referring to that one singular incident, not long after we married, when the large bug scurried out from under my toothbrush when I was getting ready to brush my teeth.  I audibly expressed my shock, because it startled me.  I may have “screamed,” as my husband alleges.

He came rushing to the bathroom to see what was wrong, clearly envisioning that I was in some kind of imminent peril.

“What’s the matter?”  he asked, breathlessly.
  

“Oh, it was a bug,” I said, disgusted.
  

“A bug??!!”  he said, in disbelief.

“Well, it jumped out at me,” I explained.  “I was startled.”

My husband was clearly trying to calm his beating heart from the fright I had given him.

“Did the bug have a gun?”, he asked incredulously.

By this time, my son had casually wandered out of his bedroom, and had assessed the situation.

“Oh, that was nothing,” he told my husband, “You should have heard her the time the bird got in the house at Canonsburg.”

Well, I said I wasn’t afraid of bugs.  Birds and rodents are another story entirely.