Saturday, August 24, 2013

Don’t Bug Me

I was settling in with coffee, the crossword, and “Up” and I noticed a dead bug under the coffee table. Half an hour later I’m schvitzing like a racehorse from running the vacuum over the entire living room floor (it’s all tile), moving furniture, and finding more dead bugs than on the bottom of a birdcage.

Now I’m back to the coffee and the crossword in a clean place. Oh, wait, what’s that under the piano…?

That’s Florida in summer.  This month it’s these tiny flying bugs that are drawn to the light from my monitor while I’m writing with no other lights on. They die all of their own volition and cover the floor tile like ground pepper.

Next month it will be palmetto bugs that are so big that when you step on them, the crunch drowns out the TV. Then it’s the arrival of the little sugar ants in the kitchen.

The plague of locusts must be on backorder.

10 barks and woofs on “Don’t Bug Me

  1. Bugs? Pfftt…that’s nothing. Wait’ll you have a bat in your kitchen! I maimed it with the broom. The bat was clinging to the broom bristles, so I tossed everything out the back door. Retrieved the broom later…no bat in sight.

  2. Sugar ants eh?. That’s what those are. Russ baked a cake and covered the icing with coconut last month. He ate a piece that night and when I got up the next morning he was bragging about the cake. I went to take a look, it was in a plastic cake safe, and it was covered with these little ants. We had to throw it out. So, he baked a cake Wed. night and put it in the fridge.

  3. Julie, that’s what tennis racquets are for: swatting bats. But don’t discourage them. They probably live and breed under your roof. They thrive on flying insects and are your friends. You’d just prefer they not swoop and careen around your head when you’re reading in bed. Grab the racquet and chase it outside where it belongs.

    • One more reason I fled FL – the insect life is varied, plentiful, determined to invade whatever residence you have, and generally (at least collectively) more intelligent than most of the human inhabitants. Although the three-inch-long bees we get up here took a bit of getting used to.

      • It’s true no matter where you live. In Michigan and Ohio it was mosquitoes. In Colorado it was horseflies and deer flies that took chunks of skin. In New Mexico it was scorpions and black widow spiders.

    • Yes, FC, bats are very beneficial, especially for eating MN mosquitoes. However, they carry rabies. I really do not want to have rabies shots!! And my 2 cats would need shots also. The bat was merely stunned, not hurt. The choice was between my health and the bat’s.

  4. We share this earth with many creatures. I think that’s cool, but not in my house. I have a dog, so I have been fighting the battle of the fleas. I do think I have victory in sight however temporary it may be.

    • When I moved to Miami from Albuquerque within a week Sam became a flea condo. Frontline once a month along with his heartworm pill did the trick. But even after he was gone, I used to get invasions of fleas in my house from the feral cats in the neighborhood.

      I’ll share the earth with them, but I won’t let them take over.

Comments are closed.