So when we were first looking at this house last fall, I noticed a few ladybugs in between the glass and the screen in the dining room window. I pointed them out to Hubby and told him that I vaguely remembered that some culture or other (maybe someone in Asia?) considered ladybugs good luck. We took it as a sign--even though I didn't trust my memory 100% (and now that I have dial-up, Googling it is out of the question without tying up the phone for several days...).
Ladybugs may or may not be considered lucky in some Asian (or not) culture but when they're crawling in your ears or up your nose in the middle of the night, you can only wish you were lucky enough to have a gigantic can of Raid next to the bed. When their carcasses litter your bedroom floor after every semi-warm winter afternoon, even after attempts to vacuum out every nest from every nook and cranny, they no longer seem dainty or adorable. When you begin to feel a sense of unbridled glee at sucking up yet another colony of the little buggers, you know things have gone entirely too far. Despite the cutesy ambivalence of their name, when more than, say, ten or so ladybugs gather in the same place they begin to seem a lot less ladylike.
It has gotten better the past week or so--for reasons I don't completely understand--but for a while they were EVERYWHERE. I even found one--a flat one--in a library book I was reading in the bathtub.
But in this, as in all things, perspective is important. I was busy bemoaning our infestation when Cranky Boss Lady called me about an infestation of another sort at Other Kid's house. Other Kid's Mom (who is CBL's daughter) had just called her to say there was a bear in the back of her pickup truck. Apparently OKM had loaded her truck with stuff to take to the dump the next day--she has done this a million times and never had any problems. This time a big black bear crawled right over the side of her brand new pickup truck (scratches down to bare metal), dragged the cans out and up the side of the hill to the edge of the yard, where he proceeded to pick through the contents of each can before going back for the next one.
I imagine that the vacuum, my weapon of choice in the Ladybug War, would have been pretty useless against this particular pest--at the very least, I would've needed a much bigger attachment.
The Art of Thriving ~Studio News4U
3 months ago
