Meet one of my new friends. That is, meet one of my late new friends, the Black Spiderhunter wasp. Does my apartment have a sign in the window - Find spiders here? And are there directions to a hole, invisible to the human eye, where these miniature monsters are getting in? Because I have screens, people, and screens are supposed to prevent my apartment from becoming infested with inch long big black wasps. "Up to 20 cm," my rear end. These are a good healthy inch long, and they tend to sally through the air, bumping noisily against the ceiling and scaring the daylights out of me.
Do not tell me that they just want to go outside. They should have thought of that before they came in. And do not tell me they aren't really a danger. Have you ever pissed a wasp off? Have you sat on one by accident? I have. It's an experience I don't plan to repeat anytime soon.
And so out comes the poison. Big can of Black Flag House & Garden that hasn't seen the light of day in about five years. And now, of course, I'm breathing the stuff in myself - which, I suppose is a kind of justice.
I'm curious, though. What goes through the wasp mind when it is wiggling its way into a tiny little opening somewhere around my windows? Is it just curious? Is there some kind of biological imperative that dictates it must crawl into all tiny available spaces? Or am I just mildly cursed?
I ask because the last couple of weeks have been a bizarre mixture of good and bad. I'm humming along, taking care of roughly three thousand teaching and business details (when I'm not working full time) and some of this is going splendidly, especially on the days when I get over four hours of unbroken sleep.
On the other hand, I broke my glasses a week ago, screwed my computer up, and while paying for Pizza on Friday night, I managed to drop $50 in the lobby of my building as I juggled purse and pizza box. Today, I was up at 6:00 - spent hours writing handouts for my beading classes, filing deskfill and paying bills. At 3:00 p.m. I emerge from the studio, looking forward to having a few hours downtime, only to find a living room full of wasps.
It's just stuff, right? It's not cancer and I'm not in Buffalo freezing after a freak snowstorm...but sometimes, don't you just get fed up when the stuff keeps coming?
Thank you for listening to me whine. The pity-party should end about the time I get the smell of Black Flag out of my nose.
Here's a little quiz for you! How big is that hornet? In inches? Grinning. Thanks to The Hermit Queen for notes.
