Cerebrate Good Times

I guess I spoke too soon when I said we had no more pets . The box elder bugs we had at our old place must have told their relatives in our new area that we are good people to be around, because they're seriously invading our house. They're walking around the floor all day, hanging out in the sink for some reason, and dying in our lamp again. I am all for "live and let live," but last night Katie found one in the soup we made for dinner (yes, Jer, the soup you ate with us). It's time for the bugs to get out, and I'm going to pack their tiny suitcases for them.

This is a drawing of a box elder beetle. We get a lot of these beetles in the house. They don’t bite and they don’t get into our food or anything. They just walk around, looking for decaying plant matter to eat. It’s sort of like having a bunch of little pets that you don’t have to take care of. They do occasionally fly around inside (which makes my two-year-old point and say “Whoa! Bug!”), but they really don’t bother us. This life, however, is apparently not always fulfilling enough. And so, at about 10:00 last night, one of these little critters decided to climb up into a halogen floor lamp and take his own life. The immediate result of this, aside from the poor thing’s demise, was that we wondered if our house was on fire. Let me tell you, the smell of frying insects is probably something to avoid whenever possible.