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Wasps in the Eaves!
Aug. 9th, 2010 04:16 pmRed alert! Flying stinging insects are making their home around MY home!
So, I grew up in Virginia. Where there are lots and lots and lots of flying, stinging insects. Honeybees (neighbors kept beehives), yellowjackets (the little bastards), wasps, and hornets.
I have a phobia about bees and wasps. It's not rational, of course. Duh. It's a phobia. But it's there. And that's despite my never, to the best of my recollection, never having actually been stung. I've seen people stung. I was even around when a couple of kids were stung repeatedly (and badly) at a church picnic (they stumbled onto a yellowjacket nest), though I didn't actually witness it. But I've never been stung.
Doesn't matter. I have a phobia, and have had since before I started school. I remember living in our first house, which had a basement door that opened beneath the concrete stairs that let up to the kitchen--it was a sheltered spot where we could store the lawnmower and other such stuff. There was a wasp nest under there. I remember standing inside the basement, staring up at it through the screen door (absolutely convinced they were all staring back at me with their evil, evil eyes), working up my nerve to bolt through the door and race past the nest like the the hordes of hell were after me.
In Brookneal, where we moved when I was six, we occasionally dealt with wasps--and once or twice my dad had to deal with a hornet nest in a tree. Those damned wasps were everywhere, making nests under eaves, in trees, inside the hollow metal frames of clotheslines. You never knew where they'd pop up. Whenever I had to mow the grass, I did it in a cold sweat, afraid I'd discover a new nest the hard way. (Mom, dad, it wasn't that I didn't want to do the chore--it was abject terror.) I'm kind of amazed, in retrospect, that for all the running around in the woods we did, we never stumbled into trouble.
So, anyway, I spent my life on Yellow Alert for wasps and hornets. I never approached a house but that I checked the eaves for signs of a nest, and if I saw one, I gave it a wide berth. I never left the windows down in my car, no matter how hot the temperature, lest they invade it. I wasn't about to have to scan every inch of the interior every time I got into it.
And then I moved to Portland. Where most people don't even have screens in their windows! I couldn't imagine it. Where they insane? Well...no, as it turned out. There's a lot less insect activity here in general. _I_ still don't open a window without putting a screen in it (removable, folding one-size-fits-all screens are a piss poor substitute for a real screened window, but...you do what you can). And I continued my vigilant surveillance for years.
But slowly I relaxed. I never saw any wasp nests. Ever. They (wasps) were around, I know. I saw them occasionally. But I never saw nests under the eaves of buildings, and especially not around my house. So I relaxed.
Until this week. When I happened to think about it and looked up as I was going in the back door. And there it was. A goddamn wasp nest. Small, but definitely there. And of the hard mud variety, not the paper sort. So after a brief pause to let my heart rate return to something approaching normal, I looked around. And found a second nest in the eaves on the side of the house. Sumbitch!
After working up my nerve (shades of my pre-school self staring up at that nest beneath the stairs), I used a broomhandle to crush the nest by the back door. And then fled inside. You know, just in case. Fortunately, I got 'em.
The other nest, alas, is too high to reach. I'm gonna have to get some wasp/hornet spray to deal with that one. In the mean time, I'm back on Condition Yellow! Check those eaves! Bastards.
In other news, I wrote 4,000 words today. Go me!
In other other news, I got two rejections yesterday via email, so I have to figure out where to send those stories next.
Stories in Circulation: 10
Rejections: 48
Stories Accepted: SEVEN
Stories to Resubmit: 2
Novel Queries: 2 Novels in circulation, 10 queries out (5 each)
Novel Rejections: 8 (all on the first one so far)
So, I grew up in Virginia. Where there are lots and lots and lots of flying, stinging insects. Honeybees (neighbors kept beehives), yellowjackets (the little bastards), wasps, and hornets.
I have a phobia about bees and wasps. It's not rational, of course. Duh. It's a phobia. But it's there. And that's despite my never, to the best of my recollection, never having actually been stung. I've seen people stung. I was even around when a couple of kids were stung repeatedly (and badly) at a church picnic (they stumbled onto a yellowjacket nest), though I didn't actually witness it. But I've never been stung.
Doesn't matter. I have a phobia, and have had since before I started school. I remember living in our first house, which had a basement door that opened beneath the concrete stairs that let up to the kitchen--it was a sheltered spot where we could store the lawnmower and other such stuff. There was a wasp nest under there. I remember standing inside the basement, staring up at it through the screen door (absolutely convinced they were all staring back at me with their evil, evil eyes), working up my nerve to bolt through the door and race past the nest like the the hordes of hell were after me.
In Brookneal, where we moved when I was six, we occasionally dealt with wasps--and once or twice my dad had to deal with a hornet nest in a tree. Those damned wasps were everywhere, making nests under eaves, in trees, inside the hollow metal frames of clotheslines. You never knew where they'd pop up. Whenever I had to mow the grass, I did it in a cold sweat, afraid I'd discover a new nest the hard way. (Mom, dad, it wasn't that I didn't want to do the chore--it was abject terror.) I'm kind of amazed, in retrospect, that for all the running around in the woods we did, we never stumbled into trouble.
So, anyway, I spent my life on Yellow Alert for wasps and hornets. I never approached a house but that I checked the eaves for signs of a nest, and if I saw one, I gave it a wide berth. I never left the windows down in my car, no matter how hot the temperature, lest they invade it. I wasn't about to have to scan every inch of the interior every time I got into it.
And then I moved to Portland. Where most people don't even have screens in their windows! I couldn't imagine it. Where they insane? Well...no, as it turned out. There's a lot less insect activity here in general. _I_ still don't open a window without putting a screen in it (removable, folding one-size-fits-all screens are a piss poor substitute for a real screened window, but...you do what you can). And I continued my vigilant surveillance for years.
But slowly I relaxed. I never saw any wasp nests. Ever. They (wasps) were around, I know. I saw them occasionally. But I never saw nests under the eaves of buildings, and especially not around my house. So I relaxed.
Until this week. When I happened to think about it and looked up as I was going in the back door. And there it was. A goddamn wasp nest. Small, but definitely there. And of the hard mud variety, not the paper sort. So after a brief pause to let my heart rate return to something approaching normal, I looked around. And found a second nest in the eaves on the side of the house. Sumbitch!
After working up my nerve (shades of my pre-school self staring up at that nest beneath the stairs), I used a broomhandle to crush the nest by the back door. And then fled inside. You know, just in case. Fortunately, I got 'em.
The other nest, alas, is too high to reach. I'm gonna have to get some wasp/hornet spray to deal with that one. In the mean time, I'm back on Condition Yellow! Check those eaves! Bastards.
In other news, I wrote 4,000 words today. Go me!
In other other news, I got two rejections yesterday via email, so I have to figure out where to send those stories next.
Stories in Circulation: 10
Rejections: 48
Stories Accepted: SEVEN
Stories to Resubmit: 2
Novel Queries: 2 Novels in circulation, 10 queries out (5 each)
Novel Rejections: 8 (all on the first one so far)
