Bugs
 

So it turns out my house has been secretly harboring hordes of carpenter ants, carpenter bees, and termites. But, every Spring another more disgusting fiend intrudes on my turf...

http://jacobgrier.com/blog/wp-content/camel_cricket.jpg

The camel cricket, also known here in NJ as the mole cricket. They tend to make a home for themselves in my basement near the hot water heater and can be seen hopping around whenever I go down there to work out or do laundry. They are probably the most repulsive things I've ever seen in person, and simply stepping on them won't work because they'll either splat all over the ground or jump on you and bite you.

I'm not saying we've been overrun. They're just a minor annoyance every year. We have the exterminator coming in this week to bomb the place. So what are your insect stories and phobias?

My insect story is that my secondary career to education was going to be entomology. I love bugs, or insects specifically. I spent a summer intern position catching and taxonomically classifying local area insects.

When I was around 10, I formed a lame group made up of neighbourhood kids called the Wasp Squad and we would go around everywhere spraying wasp nests with Super Soakers. Never got stung, surprisingly! I recall spraying an ant nest with a hose around breeding season and ants spread everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. I rode my bike over a kilometer away and there were drones flying around. Both experiences were awesome.

I live on the tenth floor of an apartment building, and yet we STILL somehow have a significant on-and-off ant problem. Other than that... Nothing much.

not the best stories, but eh
 

Oh fuck me, I used to get those crickets when I lived in Maryland. Uglier than cicadas and they show up every fucking year.

Now I just get the occasional frog infestation, which I consider a reasonable tradeoff all around.

Goddamn earwigs. Completely, utterly harmless (despite demented old wives tales to the contrary,) but so freaking interested in getting up in your face by surprise.

"Hello! I'm in your periodicals!"
"Hello! I'm in your wet towel!"
"Hello! I JUST FELL FROM THE CEILING!"*
"Hello! There's a thousand of us under that stone!"

It's like they all want to be in cinema, providing cheap scares in horror movies.

*That's even a standard earwig tactic according to Wikipedia.

We used to get earwigs in our old house. Usually found them in the shower doing the standard doom from above attack. The one thing I don't miss about that house.

Need some advice. Since my last post I have been under sustained attack by carpenter ants. They just started coming out of the heat vent by the window in my living room and I've been slowly dousing the area in Raid, remembering to keep the window open so I don't gas myself. It's been a steady raid-vacuum up the dead-raid-vacuum all afternoon. Not sure how long I can hold out. They all seem to be confined to a small area behind the blinds right now, so if I let it go overnight it shouldn't get too messy.

It doesn't help that earwigs are among the freakiest looking things I've seen in my life.

Anyways, bug wise, at the moment we're going through an ant invasion. These aren't the little black sugar ants we usually get inside the house, these are big, fast suckers that are smart enough to dive for cover when the kitchen light gets turned on. However, we seemed to have found a poison that they just can't get enough of, so hopefully the tide will soon turn.

Other than that, the only thing I really worry about is spiders. Living in a basement, spiders will pop up as surely as the sun rises. It being spring, I have to get back in the habit of vacuuming out my window and closet much more often than I had to during the winter.

Though I hear that it has been confirmed that there are killer bees in Utah now. Joy. At least we don't have fire ants yet.

I try to avoid anything with more than six legs. I mean really, do you need that many legs to function? Six at the very most is enough. It's really the small, fast bugs that freak me out. Like centipedes and millipedes and all those 'pedes. We get most of them in our basement, the worst was when I picked up a towel as I was going for a shower and one of the buggers fell out. They're just so damn hairy-looking, all those feelers and legs, it's gross.

Another time, something equally hairy-looking dropped down to me from our living room cieling. I got out of the way before it landed, but looking up and seeing this long, too many legged thing dropping from above was startling.

This is a slight hyperbole away from sounding like a radio transmission out of a war zone. It's awesome.