monitorkitty

hourglasses and me
Current mood: contemplative

I know I’m crazy – but tonight I had real and true confirmation.

We’re standing out back – waiting to put stuff onto the grill, and I practically choke on my frosty adult beverage….because I see this shiny, black, eight-legged body meandering about underneath the slight overhang on our porch floorboards.

Shiny. Black. Eight legs…….but it *can’t* be. It’s too big.

So we get closer to investigate. Hmmm….yes – there’s something red on the black.

But it’s too big. There’s simply no way.

But there is, my friends, there is.

A frantic drive to purchase bug spray later – and I’m standing there trying to gear myself up for the coup de grace.

And I do it. And I watch the other little multi-legged ones run screaming out of their hidey-holes because SHE lived among them.

And I sobbed like I haven’t been able to for months.

And I ran inside and atoned for my sins by sending beneficial insects to Africa or India via Heifer International.

Yow.

It had to be earwigs.

I have spent years hoping – nay, praying – that earwigs would never play a significant role in my life.

As a child, I lay awake at night – paralyzed with fear that earwigs would find me. Clearly – they would seek out my ears and once they had found them – they would spend their time driving me mad with their incessant….sound.

I didn’t know what sound they would make. That likely made it that much worse. Would they buzz? howl? make some sort of gibbering metallic sound that would slowly eat away at whatever vestige of sanity that remained?

I was an excitable child, you realize….

In any event – over time, the fear of the savage earwig recessed – much as my love for anything associated with Sid and Marty Krofft. And yet – the desire to keep the sheets – or my hair – over my ears as I slept remained. It became rote. Ritualistic, if you will.

So imagine my horror when I found that the intriguing insects that had taken up residence on my back porch were none other than…

Earwigs.

The first night I barely slept – even though I knew that they could find no safe haven within my walls. They had haunted my childhood – how could I deny their power now?

I researched further, however. I needed to know the exact nature of my old nemesis.

And so I discovered that these earwigs were no ordinary creatures. Oh no – that would be far too….easy.

They were riparian earwigs.

As such they conjured up images of Hyacinth and Richard and half-remembered riparian entertainments.

Suddenly they were hardly as sinister as they had once appeared. I have viewed them – I have come almost close to welcoming them – provided they arrive with the proper pedigree and the requisite room for a pony.

But I refuse to cut my hair now.

One never knows when one might need it.

So the one thing they don’t tell you about moving to the bucolic splendors of Gloucester is that there are lots of bugs.

Big ones.

Actually, I’ve been having a fun time looking at them all and trying to figure out what they are. There’s things here that defy classification – or at least I haven’t been arsed to look them up in a bug book.

We have bugs that look like small dinosaurs, bugs that look like Faberge creations and bugs that create some of the most interesting little homes you can imagine. We have cicadas in the trees that regularly launch themselves at my head, little headbanging beetles that randomly skip across my newspaper, and a shy but humongous funnel spider (not the kind from Australia – I already had that moment of fear – the ‘oh crap! that thing came to Gloucester from Australia on a boat and is living on the side of my house and will probably sneak into the house in the middle of the night and when I least expect it it will organize all the clowns that live in the walls and they will suck my brains out…..” but that only lasted for a minute or two…).

We have wildlife as well. There’s a small skunk that lives under the shed, frenchfry birds nesting on our front porch (you know, the kind you see begging for food at McDonalds?) and a trio of hummingbirds with entitlement issues.

Last night we also had some kind of large heron-like creature land in our pear tree, looking totally out of sorts and rather embarrassed at the hummingbirds that were trying to intimidate it out of their tree. It finally left out of sheer humiliation.

So there’s always something different to see – and as long as they don’t come into the house and organize the clowns in the walls into an invading horde, we should be fine.

This is day two of the dog invasion.

The Reverend Goddess Callisto Echo is here and we have survived the first day. We have barked, chased the cat, growled at the rats and made a half-hearted attempt to find the mole. All in all, not a bad day for a dog. Particularly a dog that is an ordained minister. Of course, so is my cat. Based on their reaction to one another, I’m guessing that their theology differs somewhat and that Sumi just can’t accept Calli’s dogma (ooooh, that was bad).