Today I did a thing I had been putting off and it was worse than my worst imaginings. You would like to hear about it, wouldn't you?
This is what happened: several Christmases ago I was given a little neck pillow. It was filled with some kind of grain -- one of those things you can dampen and pop in the microwave if you have a sore neck. It holds the heat.
But (we got your foreshadowing right here, folks!) that's not all it holds.
One day a gravid Asian lady beetle found her way into the upstairs bathroom closet shelves. Mostly they were filled with plastic things: expired inhalers, outdated glasses, contact solution from ten years ago. This lady beetle sniffed her way to the neck pillow. It was soft, and filled with food. Popcorn, it turns out. "This is the place," she said, like a six-legged Brigham Young, and there she laid her eggs.
When the baby lady beetles hatched out they availed themselves of this delicious food source. They grew; they multiplied; they began marching out of the closet.
Pete has been vacuuming them up from the floor periodically, but he asked me if we could deal with them in a more permanent way today. When I opened the doors I found thousands of them. THOUSANDS. Many were dead, but they had plenty of live friends to keep things interesting.
It wasn't too bad when I was able to use the vacuum to dispose of them. Then for a while I used a plastic grocery bag over my hand to minimize contact with baby beetles when I was purging bigger stuff. But I had to deal with the horror pillow, and here is where things got bad.
With my plastic-covered hand I picked up the pillow with one hand and the trash can in the other. My plan was to drop it quickly in the trash and go back to vacuuming. BUT! ALAS! WAIT I HAVE TO STOP TYPING AND TWITCH WITH HORROR AS I REMEMBER THIS MOMENT--
--the tiny bugs had been eating the fabric as well as the popcorn inside it, and when I picked up the pillow its chewed-up fabric ripped wide open. Its bottom half plopped back onto the shelf. There was an explosion of popcorn, beetles alive and dead, and piles of what I assume was a blend of beetle frass and beetle carcasses. This vile gray dust geysered out over my face and hair and bathrobe--
--SHUDDER SHUDDER SHUDDER--
--causing me to yell ICK ICK ICK very loudly.
You guys, there was so much horrible frass/carcass dust and so much popcorn and so many lady beetles. I had a town's worth of beetle babies. But I razed their metropolis. I threw all of the towels in the washing machine; I stripped naked and scrubbed my scalp vigorously and washed every stitch of clothing I had worn.
And now I have told you the story, even though I had to stop in every sentence and scratch my scalp. Just to make sure I didn't have any beetle friends crawling in my hair. How was your day?
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