If you think I'm exaggerating about the bugs

Then here you have it.  Undeniable proof.  The bugs are as big as a car.

Because Karma hears everything

Karma? The Fates? What do you call it?

You know when a person brags, "My job is so great! My life is peachy! I have a great car! Everyone wants to be me!" yadda yadda yadda, and then that person gets in a car accident and gets fired and gets dumped all in the same week? I'm not talking about personal experience, but isn't that a cliche or something?

Anyway, what happened exactly? Did someone hear the boasting and think, "That person better be taken down a few notches"? Was it Karma? That's what I like to think, but I'm curious:

What do you call that ironic little schmuck that we all know and dread?

Monica from Friends says it's God: [when she sees Richard for the first time since their breakup--at the video store and wearing her scrubbies with a sock or something stuck to her clothes by static cling] I forget exactly how the line goes, but she says something about how it's laundry day. Then she laughs and says, "Or, God knew I'd be running in to you and saw an opportunity."

But what about in Ghost when Patrick Swayze says, "I just don't want the bubble to burst," and then he gets shot? The whole point of the movie is what a great person he was, so how could that be Karma? Is it just dumb luck? Irony?

Alanis Morissette knows all about the irony . . . she just calls it life. "Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you . . . Who would've thought? It figures."

At any rate, I don't know if it's Karma, The Fates, God, Life, Kismet, or what, but someone was listening the other day when my sister and I were talking about indoor pests.

She told me about her tricky ant problem, and I told her about our mouse problem. I explained that we finally had the mice under control (remember: I live in the country. We'll always be under some form of Mouse Attack). But then I started telling her about how good our house was looking, how much progress we've made with renovations on a budget of zero dollars. Yay, life in our house is peachy.

Famous last words. I got home that night to find out . . . we had a friggin' BEE problem! Coming out of the vent in the ceiling, buzzing around the lights, dying on the windowsills, divebombing the cats, lurking in the shag. We probably sucked up 30 in the vacuum the first day.

What kind of sick joke are The Fates playing on us? Because someone out there thought, "Gee, I think they need another household problem in addition to the shag carpeting and 5 indoor pets. Let's try some . . . bees! This is gonna be real fun!"

Was it just our turn to spin the roulette wheel of House Crapola? Could it just as easily have been a faucet exploding or broken dryer? Is there some sadistic maniac out there pulling cards from a deck of bad luck . . . and we're the Asshole?

Remember Presidents and Assholes? The drinking game from college? Good ol' P & A! Good times, good times.

Or was it Karma? I think Karma is a big fan of the Live and Let Live Policy, which I always follow when I'm outside. Unfortunately, Dan doesn't. The day before the bees arrived inside, Dan had Raid'ed a beehive that was on our roof. Did the little black and yellow bastards that survived think, "This'll teach them to Raid our hive!" Did an enraged Karma show one bee a way in, and then that bee stood in the doorway yelling, "Come on, guys! Let's get 'em!"

Did the combination of Raid'ing the beehive and my ooh'ing and ahh'ing about our progress with our renovations equal Bad House Juju?

We had to call Terminix to come in and spray to get rid of the darn bees, and so far . . . everything seems quiet. Although I'm still finding dead, desiccated bees throughout the house. Their bodies are like paper and their wings fall off and get stuck in the shag and won't come up even when you vacuum. Twice. Karma's sick joke continues . . . those darn sticky wings are going to be stuck in our shag until we replace the floors.

And, to add insult to injury, we just lived through a storm of ladybugs. Not as bad as some places I've seen, but still . . . yuck. Ladybugs are horrible bugs to have inside; their bodies are big enough to cast a shadow when they fly in front of a light, and you can hear the "tink, tink, tink" as they make mad love to the bathroom mirror. Wha-wha-what, you ask?

I'm serious. They throw their bodies at the mirror in ecstasy, over and over and over. I can hear it two rooms away. It wakes me up out of a dead sleep! Tink, tink, tink. . . . Tink! They bounce off the mirror or a window several times, then pause to rest for a while. Then they're back at it, like some kind of masochistic addict.

The only way to stop them is to grab them with a piece of tissue and flush them down the toilet. But no quantity of tissue is enough to cover the sound of that nauseating crunch, the snap of their little wings. So I grab them tentatively and Karma whispers in the ladybug's ear to seize their opportunity and FLEE!

I don't know how to explain what happens next. It doesn't matter that it's just a puny ladybug, one one-zillionth my size. It doesn't matter because every time it happens the same way. Did Karma give it courage? I wad up the tissue, grab the bug, and on the way to the toilet to dispose of the intruder, the lady bug opens its wings wide and charges toward my face, screaming like a fury.

Every time, every damn time, I duck. And every time, it escapes.

I wonder, is it the sound of the ladybug's wings, or is it Karma laughing, that I hear as it zooms away?

Ugly bugs

Oregonians don't know how good they've got it. The weather is better, the food is better, and the BUGS ARE SMALLER. Not just smaller in size, but smaller in quantity.

Let me explain the wood spider. If you say wood spider to anyone in Ohio, they know exactly what you mean, although technically I think it's the WOLF SPIDER. It has to be in ALL CAPS like that.

WOLF SPIDERS are the biggest, hairiest, ugliest, most satanic bugs I've ever seen, second only to the wood-boring bumblebee (technically "carpenter bee"). These photos are from Wikipedia, of course:

Wolf Spider

Carpenter bee

Don't they just give you the WILLIES?

Now, I don't know what size of a computer screen you have, or your resolution, but on mine, I'd like to point out that the pictures above are ACTUAL SIZE (i.e., the spider is about 2 inches across including the legs). Wait, that's not right. I'm a little off on the spider. This is more accurate:

Okay, okay, okay. A slight exaggeration.

But on a non-exaggeration note, these are the most monstrous, evil bugs you have ever seen, and it has absolutely no effect on your psyche that both are non-aggressive and "generally harmless to humans." When you hear one of those bumblebees buzzing around in your living room, there is no other possible response except to run screaming from the house.

For the spider I don't have to run out of the house, but I do have to exit the room completely.

I do not ever once remember seeing bugs of this magnitude in Oregon, flying or crawling. The biggest spiders were Daddy Long Legs, and Oregonian bumblebees are "cute" with their slow, fat, hairy bodies that make you think of little girls in Halloween costumes.

Please no debate about genus, family or class here -- they look the same, close enough to me! -- but their cousin the wood boring bumblebee is not so adorable. Nor does it conjure images of plastic pumpkin buckets filled with candy. No, the wood boring bumblebee actually does bore into wood. Specifically, our 3-sided dump of a shed on the back side of our carriage house (that is going to be torn down this summer). Supposedly the wood boring bumblebee is not social, but there are an awful lot of them hanging around, drinking beers and gossiping, out behind our carriage house. They're like a gang; as soon as they see "fresh meat" they all surround you and start poking fun at your clothes or your hairstyle or your shoes or your glasses or whatever else a gang would poke fun at.

And you know you're not supposed to swat at any type of bee or wasp, but those hairy, mammoth bodies are built for buzzing, designed to drone. It's this low-pitched humming sound that at first seems really far away, until you realize your ears are playing tricks on you. It's not the far-off sound of farm machinery, it's a close at hand vibration coming out of a bug the size of Texas. "Don't swat." Yeah. Right.

The WOLF SPIDER is more of a solitary beast, but don't get me wrong: they have seen their share of movies and are now experts on Hollywood cinema. They know just the appropriate horror-movie moment when they should POP OUT at you. I know it's my imagination, but I swear the sound of their legs skittering across the floor sounds just like the "ree ree ree" you hear when the villain is poised on the other side of the corner with a knife or an ax or a rope. Then you see the victim on screen with their wide-eyes as they hesitate, wondering if they should run up the stairs or out the front door.

Of course, they always run up the stairs.