Let the Infestations Begin!

Remember being little, and how cute you thought ladybugs were, and how it was good luck to have one on your finger, and you wanted to be one for Halloween? Remember? Yeah, I remember too. I was sooooo bamboozled. I think they do that on purpose, they come across as all benign and adorable, because they know that one day they are simply TAKING OVER YOUR HOUSE.

I had seen this phenomenon once before, in the Smoky Mountains. We rented a cabin there one Mardi Gras weekend (it was amazing how many fellow Louisiana refugees I saw in Tennessee that weekend, escapees from the madness, but I digress) - and when we settled in there were literally heaps of dead ladybugs all over the cabin. There was a little sign explaining that a couple times a year the ladybugs make their way inside presumably to get warm. I don't know whether they make little ladybug love inside the house and that's why there are bazillions of them or if that many really managed to wiggle through whatever tiny openings there must have been in the cabin. The agency came and cleaned them up, so it wasn't all that big a deal, but I did find it highly unusual. I mean, in my experience insect infestations were things like locusts or cockroaches, things you already felt really good about hating. A ladybug infestation was a little ambiguous.

I have lived in Oregon three years, and not in a vastly different locale than my current one, either - we literally moved down the road, about 2 miles, to take up residence on the farm. In all my time here, no one has mentioned nor have I seen a ladybug infestation. Maybe it was just waiting for me.

So I painted my bedroom the loveliest shade of pale robin's egg blue. It is very serene. Serene is very good in a bedroom, don't you think? Shouldn't your bedroom be a place of sanctuary, full of things that lower your blood pressure at the end of a stressful day? Ahhhhhh. Well apparently my lovely blue bedroom looks like the sky and is very appealing - to BUGS. Allllll kinds of bugs. I came in one lovely day of late and went into my lovely serene sanctuary, and the pale blue walls were brown and moving. Literally, there were that many of them.

Now we all know my propensity for screaming, but I was a model of restraint here, even though I WAS instantly put in mind of a story told by a good friend in medical school. He had spent some time in some hideous tropical locale in less than 4-star accomodations, and woke in the night to the illusion that his ceiling was moving. No illusion. The ceiling was ALIVE, blanketed in tarantulas. I would have expired on the spot. SO here were my living walls, carpeted in an assortment of creatures but predominantly ladybugs. Who knew?? What do you DO about it?

My husband - well, we all know HIS propensity for solving problems with a vacuum cleaner, and that is what he did. Sucked them up in big swaths. I will confess to throwing back my covers and beating them prodigiously just in case there were any hangers-on, but the place was clean by bedtime. Next morning, still clean as a whistle. It was my morning to sleep in, which I was really enjoying, until a lot of buzzing caught my attention. Bad memories. There was a yellow jacket making the rounds of my room, and he had brought reinforcements. When I surveyed the room, I saw that sometime in the last hour (since I was last awakened by something) the ladybug infestation was on its second wave. This time, I figured - if they can come IN through the windows (no screens) they can go OUT, so I just left the windows up and hoped for the best. Amazingly, they left by dark. This is quite mysterious behavior to me, but hey, whatever works.

So the ladybugs still show up in the corners of windows and sills, but I can live with it, and figure it is self-limited. The yellow jackets are lots nastier but aren't coming inside in great numbers, and I am a REALLY good shot with a towel. You do not want to cross me while freshly out of the shower, I can HURT you with a rolled up towel. I am a thwacker par excellence.

So the infestation that is really chapping me are the FRUIT FLIES. Where the bloody hell do these things come from? I mean, I never see them outside. Ever. I do not know where they live and reproduce. But leave out a little fresh fruit, or slice some raw veggies and leave them on the counter, and out of nowhere you have CLOUDS of them. It is just beyond annoying. I have been told lots of ways to get rid of them - dishes of vinegar, wine, all sorts of things that DO NOT WORK. They are relentless. And having spent a rather long period of years in science, including research, I know that the generation time of fruit flies is like a microsecond. You blink and there are orders of magnitude more of them. NO ONE can have sex that fast.

SO I am enjoying the fruits of my farm, but unfortunately so are the bugs. If anyone knows a SUREFIRE way to get rid of the little buggers, or what I am doing wrong to get them in the first place, please do tell. My wrist is getting sore from all that thwapping.

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Oh, and just in case you need something to distract you from the notion that your dear life partner is occasionally dumb as a rock, let me put all that in a little perspective.

Remember the stump full of yellow jackets? Angry, angry yellow jackets, that my husband tried to burn out, and then tried to suck up in a shop vac?

I got a good deal on some bamboo poles at a garage sale, bought about 30 of them to use in the garden, and they are standing up against the side of the garage. Unfortunately close to the stump. Close enough that my husband was able to see them and the stump within the same field of vision and have a really idiotic idea. So, I guess he just wasn't really convinced they were gone, but that being the case it was a REALLY idiotic idea. I mean if you think they might still be in there, why would you want to poke them? WHYYY? And if you don't think they are in there, why would it occur to you to try to poke what isn't there? WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO STICK A LONG BAMBOO POLE IN A STUMP FULL OF YELLOW JACKETS AND WIGGLE IT AROUND???? But. He did. And when he sort of had a lucky hit, and found the spot, and they started making some noise and flying out of there, he had the most insanely little boy oh-this-is-so-cool-I-wonder-if-they-could-really-hurt-me-oh-brother-Mom-better-never-find-out look on his face. The power of the Y chromosome.

Yup, there are still some yellow jackets in that stump. And yup, they will come after you. But that man can DANCE, I tell you, he spun and leaped right out of the way, it was rather impressive really. And no harm, no foul. But I do really wonder where our children got their supreme intelligence.

Cannon Fodder

First off, thank you so much to those of you who emailed to tell me you missed my blog. It really meant a lot! I have been a little under the weather (great joke about that later) and slammed to boot. I think I know what people were up to long about last January! (I am an OBGYN people, think about it)

Anyway, here we are again. This entry may sound just a wee bit like a crab session, but so be it.

So, to the eternal embarrassment of certain of my children and the dismay of fellow rural dwellers, I simply do not like guns. I will admit to liking target shooting, in certain highly controlled circumstances, but guns on the loose, guns going off in my vicinity that I did not fire, things like that - well they just either make me nervous or mad as you know what.

So, a week or so ago I had a friend over for coffee and treats, and we decided to walk the property since she hadn't seen it yet. I love taking people for a walk up to my upper field, it has a really nice view of the coast range, Willamette Valley, and Cascades. So we are just strolling around the fields and the shooting starts. The most disconcerting thing about it was that I simply could not tell where it was coming from. It seemed to be close, it seemed to move, and it was FREAKING ME OUT. I felt like one of those ridiculous characters in Westerns with someone firing at their feet and saying "Dance, Podner!". Like I was going to have to start dancing, or running, or perhaps dying in a pool of blood in a row of burned out kohlrabi or something. I just wanted to get my little party safely across the frontier to HOME without encountering the hostile natives.

Instead, I went to my default mode of SCREAMING. This was not random, high-pitched wailing, but quite definite and quite insistent and quite inordinately pissed off English. "STOP SHOOTING! NOW!" These people must have been my long lost children, because they paid no attention to me whatsoever. The shooting just went on.

It went on for days. Weeks. It is still going on. At one point, my husband thought it sounded like shotguns (like I could tell a shotgun boom from a rifle boom from a handgun boom from a tractor backfiring), but thought whoever it was must be a lousy shot because of the frequency and pattern of the shots. He thought they must be shooting at birds and missing a lot. We did think perhaps it was deer season, as another recent guest had shot a deer the morning of their visit (I decided to like him anyway since his wife is a friend). There are a lot of deer on this property. I LIKE deer. I forgive them eating my plants, so long as they will continue to grace my pastures and pond with their ineffably lovely presence. So the thought that persons unknown were up in them thar hills shooting at the deer didn't please me.

In addition, it was growing incredibly tiresome being awakened daily by gunshots. Did I mention that I am an OBGYN? Do you know there is no more sleep-deprived occupation on the planet except perhaps President of the United States? Sleep is a holy shrine, to which I like to repair on a daily basis, at unfortunately random times of day, basically whenever I can. So to be, finally, after a long night of being awakened every 30 minutes and going in to the hospital at 4AM to do a C-section, to be finally blissfully snoring away and then roused abruptly to consciousness by the sound of guns in your bedroom (that's what it sounds like) - this did not make me a happy camper.

One night I got home well after dark and the guns were still going off. IN THE DARK. Either these people were incredibly gifted in the night vision department, had special forces goggles of some kind, or were hunting by flashlight. Seriously, people! After DARK??

Finally I took the easiest recourse - I bitched about it on Facebook. And to my surprise, and OK a little embarrassment, it would appear that no one is hunting Bambi in my woods. No one is an incredibly lousy shot at migrating geese. They are "cannons." Some weird kind of "fake guns" that are set to shoot off frequently and randomly in the vineyards. To keep the birds off the grapes that are ripening. Ahhhh. This makes sense, and I am no longer in fear for my life, or that of the wildlife hereabouts. And I do like wine. And I do understand the economic vicissitudes of dependance on a crop.

But. BUT. I am sorry, but THIS IS GETTING OLD. Harvest the grapes already. Mine are ripe, aren't yours?? Can't the grapes be covered with netting or something? When I suggested this to a friend, they told me that the "premium" vines are covered but not the others. Soooooo - you don't care enough about them to cover them but I am supposed to care enough about them to listen to cannons for weeks on end?? This does not seem quite reasonable.

Now, I know, I am going to get hate mail from vineyard owners. I have friends who are vineyard owners. I may even get hate mail from them. So here is what I propose.

You know who you are. I do not know who you are, I do know WHERE you are, but I am not going to walk onto your vineyards and up to your house and say "Howdy. Can you turn off the damn cannons, pretty please?" But if you are reading this, you know who I am so you know if you are one of the "guilty" parties. If you are, send me two bottles of your best cabernet and all will be forgiven. I can drink it to sleep through the gunfire next year!

Oh yeah - the promised joke. This is courtesy of my country guy friend Bill. The sheep guy. The one without a tranquilizing gun. Remember him? So, apparently neutered boy sheep are called wethers. Do not ask me why, I do not know. Personally, I think it is a little dumb, but there you go. So, one sheep breeder is talking to another sheep breeder, and comments "I just don't understand why all your ewes are pregnant and mine aren't!" (I didn't say he was a GOOD sheep breeder). Anyway, the other guy responds "Because back in the summer when my ewes were under a ram, yours were under the wether!"

Well, I thought it was funny!