What’s bugging me

I get freaked out by bugs landing on me. Near me is not a problem. On me is a problem. A very large moth landed on me while I was peacefully reading in bed Sunday night. It was so large that as it approached I heard its wings flapping and when it hit, I felt a little bump. I shrieked a girly shriek and then insisted that it must die. (I’m not normally violent.) Sadly – or humorously, depending on your distance from the event - the moth escaped the vortex of the flushing toilet and returned for another circle around the bedroom before meeting his final demise.

Yesterday I shrieked a much shorter girly shriek and then laughed when I spotted a praying mantis on the deck. The shriek was because I was reaching for something on the railing of the deck and as my eyes turned to follow where my hand was already going, I saw that I was about to inadvertently grab the mantis. The laugh was at myself for being startled. I took a picture. I think they are so neat looking.


praying mantis (looking at me), September 2007

THEN, as if all these close-encounters of the buggy kind weren’t enough, last night at dinner a friend was telling us about all these ‘cicada-killer wasps’ he has in his yard. As the name implies, they kill cicadas, which are pretty prevalent around here right now. As our friend was describing the wasp, we realized we had seen one in our garage around July 4th. They are HUGE; Wikipedia says they can be up to 2 inches long and the one we saw was most certainly that large. I took a picture back then too. Creepy.


cicada-killer wasp in garage, July 2007

(Note the hyphenation of "cicada-killer wasp" is mine. It's not like that in any references I found, but since the two concepts form one thought, I think it's an important hyphen. It's not a cicada wasp or a killer wasp; It's a wasp that kills cicadas. Without the hyphen one might think it's a "killer wasp" - like a "killer bee" - which it is not. They aren't really dangerous to humans unless you grab, step on, or otherwise man-handle a female. And even then, you wouldn't die. I think I'm channeling Lynne Truss or something.)