The most common lament I hear, is something along the lines that a persons’ life is boring, they want more excitement in their life.
Personally, I’ve never found excitement to be a good thing - give me a fairly uneventful life and I’ll be content. I’ve had enough excitement in my life, thank you very much, to last me the rest of my lifetime. I’m not saying I don’t want to enjoy life, I just could do without the really high peaks or deep valleys that having an exciting life seems to encourage.
Interestingly enough, my life has at times resembled the movies.
Awhile back it was:
image courtesy of: www.reelartgallery.com
You see, there always seems to be something around the house that is causing a problem. This comes from years of little or no maintenance performed by the EYOC who doesn’t seem to think things ever need to be fixed or replaced. A few summers back, I noticed there was this really nice smell over by the windows in the dining room. Of course, I thought it was the flowers or something coming into bloom because it was summertime.
Wrong.
The really pleasant, overly sweet, perfumy smell was just a way ants let you know they are in the process of setting up shop in your house. So, over the next few months there was this kind of war between me and the ants as I tried to figure out where they were coming from and to put a stop to the “Ant Invasion” (Adam Ant eat your heart out).
I plugged holes in the wall, did research on the net, put out cayenne pepper on the trails, scrubbed and scrubbed to no avail. I would be sitting at my laptop when they would rather boldly make their way across my work table. After a few unsuccessful months, I finally was able to track down their home base, which in fact turned out to be the relatively new work table I had gotten from Ikea.
In the process of setting it up to work on, I had drilled holes in the bottom of the table to mount a surge protector on. There was an open drill hole and the interior of the table was hollow which was all the invitation needed for the ants to move in. To prove my theory, I put a little bit of insect spray around the hole and was rewarded by the swarm.
Needless to say I removed the tables’ legs, took the tabletop and put it out by the curb. Like a lot of things around here, it never made it to the trash truck as someone came by and seeing the pristine tabletop (with only a few drill holes in the underside) thought it was the junk connoisseurs prize. At least the little beasties found a new home with someone else (a cautionary tale for all you dumpster diving hipsters out there).
After the smaller ants moved out, some time later the bigger boys on the block made a sporadic appearance (those nice large ants) but it appeared a good spraying around the houses perimeter did the trick.
So, my life was that fifties horror classic Them for awhile, as I battled the ants.
Recently, my life has transformed once again to follow the path of another movie:
The other day I noticed a bee in the window in the dining room so, I swatted it.
Saturday morning I had my coffee early and when I came back upstairs, I noticed there were six or seven bees in the dining room window (this reminded me of that scene in “The Birds” on the monkey bars). I got out a trusty can of bug spray and gave each critter a little spritz.
I went outside just to look around the outside of the house and sure enough there seemed to be one spot which had a heightened frenzy of bee activity. If I had a household version of the Department of Homeland Defense this would’ve caused me to put the house on the highest level of alert.
When I got home that night there were about 30 or 40 dead bees on the windowsill, on the floor by the window. I should qualify that, some of them just weren’t totally dead yet and sat there in the bee equivalent of a death throes.
Some selective taping and a quick vacuum later the problem was addressed - so much for excitement in my life - excitement a thing I can certainly do without.
Today was another attack on the bees, it’s war, war I say!
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