A Cruel Joke

Sometimes....I think that situations are put into our lives purely to provide entertainment for someone up above.  :) There are things in this world....specifically some bugs....that I truly believe are here on this earth to be a cruel joke.  An incident that still has my skin crawling made me reflect this past week on the absurdity of some of these creatures' existence.  I mean....WHY?!!!!!  But I'm jumping ahead of myself.  I will start at the beginning....the reason for these reflections.

As with most stories, this starts off quite pleasantly and unassuming.  The main character of my story is our beautiful Christmas Tree. If you've been reading this blog for some time, you will remember that we purchased our tree the weekend of Thanksgiving and you will remember that I just recently wrote an entry about how the tree was budding new growth.  It was a beautiful tree and Dave was determined to make it last to Easter.  Considering how new growth was ALL OVER the tree....it looked like his goal would be realized.

I wasn't feeling good on Wednesday night and had stayed home from church choir practice.  By the time Dave came home from his rehearsal and we caught up on the day, it was 10:30pm and I was beyond tired and started getting ready for bed.  Dave went to water the tree and that is when he noticed that we had a problem.  The entire bottom half of our tree was covered with a fine, silky web and in that web were thousands...if not millions...of small spider mites.  They covered everything!  Ornaments, inside balls, bows, garland, lights....everything.  And if you looked closely, you could see them moving.  (My skin is crawling right now just thinking about it) Some of the bulbs on the strands of lights were so covered with web and mites that light from the bulb was not able to shine through.  We had a major problem on our hands...and it was now almost 11pm.  

Spider Mite

There was nothing to be done except take down the tree as quickly as possible and get it out of the house.  Every ornament had to wiped down.  Every ball had to have the top taken off and then be rinsed out with very hot water.  The lights were a lost cause. Fortunately, we think we caught the problem just in time.  The top half of the tree was not yet affected.  To this day, we shake our heads in wonder as we think about what we would have been faced with had we not noticed the issue until the next day....or later.    So, when everything was off the tree, Dave took the tree, with the lights still on, outside.  I then vacuumed every little nook and cranny and we put everything (garland, ornaments, clothes that we had been wearing) in our Florida Room where the cold night temperatures would hopefully kill off anything we hadn't caught.  We finally climbed into bed around 1am...and I just felt that my skin was crawling with these things.  It was straight out of some bad movie.

And it prompted my reflection of the bugs that I despise the most....spider mites now being on that list. And they would be: 

Camelback crickets.  I cannot begin to tell you how I abhor these things.  They're a fixture here in Richmond and in the fall...become quite a nuisance in the house.  They creep me out more than almost anything else.  They look....Jurassic...and they jump like you can't believe and their defense mechanism is to jump toward you.  And they can be HUGE.  They love dark, damp places and so almost every morning in the fall when I open the bathroom door, there is at least one or two waiting to greet me.  Gives me the heebee-jeebees!!!!!  

Camelback Crickets (aka Cave Crickets, Spider Crickets, Sprickets)

Ticks.  I am paranoid about ticks.  After living in AZ and ID where they aren't too bad of a problem...I'm now in tick central.  Ugh.  Dave and I were walking around Dutch Gap (south of here) one Memorial Day weekend and stopped to read an historical sign and as we were stopped, three had jumped on to my legs.  I started doing the Mexican Hat Dance and making a complete idiot of myself.  But I have no pride when it comes to ticks being on my person.

Sewer Roaches.  Okay.  ALL roaches are disgusting and if I never saw one again, it would be too soon.  But the sewer roaches from the Phoenix Valley in AZ....well, I just got chills thinking about them.  They would come up through the drains after the sewers had been cleaned and they were huge.  They could also fly.  You would be floating on your back in the pool and see something flying out of the tall cypress trees that line my parents' back yard and then it would plop in the pool....usually in close vicinity to where you were floating.  In 7th grade, I was getting ready for school in the morning, put on my tennis shoe, and felt something run from the tip of my toe to the gap where your arch is...flung the shoe off and towards the wall and promptly saw a roach emerge from the shoe.  I could feel that sensation the rest of the day and didn't wear those shoes for an entire week.

Mosquitoes.  I probably hate these things the most.  They're not creepy like the other contestants but they are annoying beyond belief and seem to have me on their radar.  In the summer, Dave and I will both be outside working in the yard and I'll come in just covered with bites and Dave won't have even one.  They seem to lay in wait for me.  I just have to open the door and get the mail and I'll come back inside with a new bite.  And given my extremely sensitive skin, these bite marks last for weeks.

Cruel jokes.  All of them!  Why are they even allowed to survive?!!!!  My apologies if your skin is now crawling too but I couldn't let the week pass without voicing my utmost disdain for these creatures.  So....now you know.