Changes of weather seem to bring out the creepy crawlies in a house. Sometimes those are just houseflies coming back to life after a long Canadian winter. There could also be ants crawling around outside the garage or patio.
Worse-case scenario, they may be carpenter ants or termites – especially if you’ve just listed your home for sale and you notice a termite tunnel running along the ceiling of your basement. Or around where your basement ceiling used to be located.
Bugs of all sorts bother me now, not just the kind that present legitimate challenges for home sellers and buyers.
I realize and respect that they have their place in the eco-system. Smaller insects feed the birds we love to see in our yard and trees. Bigger, grosser bugs constitute the diet of contestants on reality TV competition shows.
All that said, and for some reason I cannot put my finger on, I now get serious weebie-jeebies if I feel something crawling up my arm when I’m out on my deck. The absolute quickest way for a bug to be hurried along to an abruptly flattened termination is to be creeping across my bare foot.
Maybe this serious distaste is related to the story a friend once told me about a moth flying into his ear, and how his equilibrium then became similar to that of one of those inflatable plastic punching bags. Every time he tried to move his legs in conjunction with where his eyes were focused, he moved closer to the wall or the floor than safely in the direction he intended to move.
I envisioned the difficulty one might have, trying to swat a little pest like that inside your ear. And with what? A flattened Q-Tip?
Much as I have come to dislike insects of all persuasions, I recently discovered that I now possess an odd quirk, one that occurs after catching and sending one of those creepy little crawlers off to oblivion. Any contact with a bug (even with the protection of four pieces of facial tissue and a falconer’s glove) will immediately necessitate a thorough washing of my hands with soap and water. Sometimes three to four times in a row, without getting more than a couple of steps away from the sink before I have to return. If I have to use a fly swatter, well, you may as well forward my hands to a NASA decontamination chamber.
I suppose I’ve heard too many stories about how many germs the average housefly carries, or it finally dawned on me one day, what my buddies used to mean when they commented on what flies are most often attracted to.
We’ve had a huge problem at home lately with wasps on our deck. I finally determined that we needed protection from the ceaseless dive-bombing, so I went out and purchased one of those new-fangled fly swatters. You’ve probably seen them in the stores.
It’s about the size of a badminton racquet, and with the addition of two AA batteries, carries a substantial electric “zap” (which I can attest to, as I was foolish enough to disregard the rather large warning on the packaging. Eee-Yow!).
Anyhow, since I brought it home and left it on our patio table, I’ll be darned if the wasps don’t put on the most impressive aerial displays, but now well outside the safety rails on our deck. I even spotted a big stinkbug, but as I tried to sneak up on him to test the product, he vamoosed as fast as he arrived, almost as if he were psychic, or had been tipped off by the wasps. As of today, I remain swat-less with the new swatter.
We do have a proliferation of crickets outside. There must be hundreds of them, chirping day and night. Maybe I could go on safari and try hunting some of them down.
I have recently purchased a new khaki shorts outfit, after all.
Humour columnist and author Dan St. Yves was licensed with Royal LePage Kelowna for 11 years. Check out his website at danstyves.com.
