Attack of the Bumblebees

That whole weeding impulse that I mentioned before, has gone down quite a bit. Now it's more of a guilty murmur sort of thing. I am officially procrastinating on the whole gardening thing.

And I ROCK at procrastination!

I can doze in bed until noon and still not have begun to procrastinate. I'm also really good at digressing. You could ask me a question and I can talk for an hour without actually answering it. I would be great in politics, if not for the fact that I hate to wear pantihose.

Who invented those things, anyway? The pantihose, I mean. They're horrible. No matter how much you wear them, you never get used to having them on. At least I don't. I always walk away with slight claustrophobia and a new-found sympathy for sausages.

That was first class digression, right there.

This post is really about bumblebees. You didn't see that coming, did you? It really is too bad I don't like wearing pantihose. These days we have truckloads of bumblebees buzzing around in our garden. I use them as an excuse not to do too much gardening all at once. Cause dammit, these guys are HUGE! They're not guys at all, actually. They're queens. Hence the hugeness. They're flying around, looking for little holes in walls where they can set up shop. Apparently they like to live in holes in brick houses. They hibernate in the ground during the winter, and as soon as they're all warm and toast in springtime, they start looking for a place to live.

Earlier today, I was standing in the open veranda door, looking out at the garden while doing my usual procrastination routine, when a bumblebee the size of a bloody ping-pong ball came flying towards me. It was big enough for me to give it a good kick without having to do much aiming. It went "pfbzzzzzzz!" and decided to take it's royal business elsewhere. Which is a good thing, because I'm pretty sure it could have taken me in a fight...

Time off and the evil of ants

For a very, very long time I’ve been very, very excited about today. You see, yesterday I had my last exam this semester, and that means that today is the very first day of my vacation. It’s a day I’ve dreamed about and planned in a hundred different ways many, many times. There is only one tiny, little problem.

Today is boring!

For one, it’s rainy. The first day of your summer vacation isn’t supposed to be rainy, dammit. I’m pretty sure that’s a rule. I know that I wrote it down on a piece of paper when I was a kid and gave it to my mum so that she could mail it to the king. That was ages ago, so it should have made its way into the lawbooks by now. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s also windy, which means that if you venture outside with something resembling an umbrella, you’re going to take off, Mary Poppins-style. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy flying, but I’d rather do it sitting down and with a stewardess serving me snacks, drinks and offering to fluff my pillow.

Just a little while ago, Pooch and I spent 20 minutes staring at an ant, just to see what it would get up to. Everybody knows that ants, although seemingly boring, are all psychotic maniacs. I know this for a fact, because I live in a very old house which is full of these delinquents. Only last summer I caught the little bastards trying to chew their way through the walls.
Even Pooch - who might not care much for the deeper philosophical conundrums in life – has insight enough to understand the evil of ants.

This particular ant, though, went on to crawling up the toilet bowl and falling in.

I flushed it.

I feel a little bad about that.

A very, very little.

Day of the "eeek"

Yesterday started out fantastically boring. It was plain and simply dull. I was sitting by my computer, having an IM conversation with a friend, rolling in my own tedium, when I suddenly heard a strange sound from the corner of the kitchen where the oven and the refrigerator lives. It was sort of like tapping on metal. Every time I heard it, I got up from my chair to investigate, but all became quiet as soon as I did.

Thinking that it was probably nothing, I returned to my chair and my conversation. Just as I had almost stopped thinking about the whole thing, I saw, in the corner of my eye, something small, brown and roundish dart out from behind the refrigerator and disappear behind the dog’s feed barrel. “Mouse!” shouted The Voice that lives inside my head.

In a split second, my attention was ripped away from my computer screen and towards the barrel. Somewhere along the line, I let out a gasp. The dog, which up until that moment had been snoring away in the livingroom, immediately flew out of the couch and came running. Somewhere in her puppyhood, she made the connection between gasps and something happening. As far as gasps go, this was a good one, and she was determined no to miss the cause of it.

Now I was sitting on my kitchen chair, stiff as a board, my eyes darting back and forth between the dog and the barrel. The pooch stood in the middle of the kitchen, ears pricked upwards, looking around, wide-eyed. Her whole body was tense and her tail wagged, not just from side to side, but around in circles.

The mouse chose this moment to make a run for it. Around the side of the barrel it went, towards the door which leads into the hallway. To a rodent on the run, it probably seemed like a good place to hide. The mouse and the pooch spotted eachother at the same time. Immediately, the doggie rushed forwards towards what she perceived to be a nice, crunchy snack. The mouse was rightfully terrified as it aimed for the door, moving much slower now than it initially had. I managed to slam the door shut between it and the dog before something really gross happened.

There have always been mice here in winter, living inside the walls, and I’ve gotten used to that, but I don’t want them on MY side of the walls. Now there was one in the hallway. That’s just great.

A quick search online told me what mice like to eat and how to place the traps to make sure that they are killed immediately when they walk into it. I also have a new respect for the intelligence of rats, but that’s a whole different story. After a few moments of procrastinating and feeling sorry for the mouse, which was kinda cute, after all, and hadn’t really done anything wrong (that I knew of), I loaded up four traps with bread and placed them around the hallway. Then I took the dog for a walk.

“There’s no point in checking the traps this soon,” I thought when we got back. But I did it anyway. And sure enough, there it was. Apparently it liked bread more than I thought. At first I just mentally confirm that something shaped like a mouse’s butt was sticking out of it, went “eeek”, turned right around and ran into the kitchen where I called my mother. I’m not really sure what good I thought that would do.

Then I got a broom, swept it up, went “eeek” again and dumped it into the trashcan outside, trap and all.

And that was my day.

They're back...

This morning, like every other morning (or noon, depending on wether I have to get up early or not), I was standing in my bathroom, doing my morning stuff, thinking my morning thoughts and feeling the morning chill that came crawling in through the old bathroom windows.

That’s when I heard it…

It came from my right, from a cupboard in the corner. A small, kinda sliding sound. Since the bathroom cupboard is where I store all sorts off mess that doesn’t seem to have a natural place anywhere else in the house, I thought something had just fallen over in there, or something. But then it came again, with more scratching this time. And it wasn’t from inside the cupboard at all, but from the wall behind it. That’s when I realised that it had to be them. They’d returned. It was... The Mice.

Every autumn The Mice turn up. They come in through the basement, I think, and so far, there’s been no way of stopping them. As we speak, they’re probably eating through the new insulation as if it was a woolly snack. Why can’t mice just stick to their natural habitat (laboratories or Disney World) where they belong?

I’d get a cat if it wasn’t for the fact that the dog would eat it…

Pic by Za3toooih for www.yotophoto.com