Day 20: Home Invasion

Our house is teeming with unwelcome guests. One of the worst offenders are the Asian Lady Beetles, which are not to be confused with those cute little polka-dotted ladybugs that are supposed to bring good luck. And that's a good thing, because I can't even begin to count how many of them I've flushed down the toilet in the last 24 hours. I've done a little research on these pests, the ones that 6'3 J is terrified of, and it seems that they're just looking for a four-star hotel to hibernate in for the winter. They don't cause any structural damage and they don’t chew anything. They’ll pack their bags and leave in the spring.

Asian Lady Beetles particularly like the warm, sunny side of light colored houses. Yup and yup. They're all over the southwestern side of our light coffee, baja dune and seashell colored house and they're squeezing in wherever they can (why couldn’t we have painted it plain old dark brown?!). Every half an hour or so I go into the living room and sweep these surprisingly fleet painted ladies off the windows and walls and into my hand -- as many as 30 or 40 at a time. They feel kind of creepy crawling around my palm yet I doggedly persevere. I think I've got them licked but no, minutes later the replacement troops have arrived. I even hosed off the house this afternoon in an effort to drown them or stun them or make them think that maybe this isn’t such a nice place after all, but they paid no heed. I guess they prefer the toilet.

Something really gross? Sometimes they get crushed as I pick them off the wall and they leave a trail of yellow shmush. Apparently when they feel threatened or are harmed they excrete this foul smelling liquid from their legs. And J's right, it truly stinks. He immediately smelled it when he got home from school this afternoon. He walked in the house and asked me if I'd been crushing ladybugs again.

And to top it off? Today's the third and final day of my cleanse. I'm actually not hungry anymore, but still and all, when I saw that today's little bag of goodies contained a small baked apple, I almost cried. I ate it with my fingers after one of my killing sprees and the awful ladybug stank must've gotten under my fingernails because I could taste it in my apple! Revolting!

Speaking of stank, we’re also suffering from a stink bug infestation. For several weeks now the occasional brown, rather prehistoric looking beetle has been trying to get in our bedroom. I shoo them out, and although I don't really like it when one has gotten in and goes buzzing by my head, they haven't bugged me too much.

Late this afternoon, however, I went into my bedroom and found scads of ladybugs making themselves comfortable as well as at least twenty of these big brown monsters clinging to the insides of our windows. It was a chamber of horrors! Down the toilet they all went. They're called Western Conifer Seed Bugs, also known as stink bugs because of the foul smelling substance they secrete when threatened. Unlike the ladybugs, I haven't gotten a whiff of the stink bugs' perfume, probably because I haven't posed much of a threat until now. Now that they know I'm their mortal enemy, though, well, I'm kind of scared to go to bed tonight.

And finally, one of our computers has a particularly malicious virus. Our trusty computer man spent the better part of the day waging war against the virus but it's tenacious. This doesn't bode well for our other home invaders.