You know summer is coming when you see something skitter around your ceiling out of the corner of your eye, and you don’t really want to look because it might be something scary, and you know you’re going to have to get up and kill it, and then its one of those freaking mosquito eater monsters! Man I hate those bugs. I swatted at it, but it scooted away from me. So the rest of the night I had to be really careful about sprinting into my bedroom or bathroom, and slamming the door shut so he could not infiltrate my safe zone. If I know there is a bug in my room I can’t sleep at night until I find it and make it pay.

I grew up calling these “mosquito eaters” or “mosquito hawks,” and I’ve found its a bug that draws a lot of attention to different dialects whenever you travel with someone and meet one, like in a KOA bathroom,  or summer camp, or a youth hostel, and everyone reacts to it. They are really disgusting to look at, and legend had it that they eat mosquitoes, so you would think to like this bug, but they actually eat grass, so they don’t help you at ALL in life, and we should kill them. I wikipediaed them, and their real name is “crane fly.” Interesting.

So today I decided to go to Target to get a fly swatter. What I’m really interested in is one of those bug vacuums you see advertised in the Sky Mall magazines. They are tiny bug suckers that make it possible for you to kill a bug from a few feet away, without having to stand on a chair and get too close to it, without ruining the bottom of a shoe with bug guts, or having to wipe off the bug gut splatter on  your wall (which never really comes out.) Have you seen these? Of course, by the time I’d gotten to Target, I’d forgotten why I’d come…

So, while waiting for the inspiration for the trip to come back to me, I checked in on yelp (so addicted) and read Rihanna’s interview in Vogue magazine…I tried on some summer dresses….I debated getting a one-piece bathing suit for science camp this week, but then decided that even if it was a one-piece, I would still feel really weird going swimming with my students….I looked at all the gardening stuff…I tried on sunglasses…I waited an hour for a disposable camera I couldn’t remember what was on it to develop, and then laughed out loud at all the silly pictures we clearly weren’t ready to take when we did….I read every single greeting card they had.

Finally while wandering the dollar aisles, I came across some really cute fly swatters, and then I remembered why I was there! Mission accomplished.

When I got home, I looked EVERYWHERE for that punk bug….I finally found him and we had like a five minute show down. I hate the way they want to fly right at you…all wobbly and unpredictable. I finally got him, then I went outside to water my plants, and got attacked by like six of them flying out at me from my jasmine plant. I think they were his brothers trying to avenge his death. Sigh.

Remember how I was whining about how hard it is to write a blog every day? I just wrote 585 words about a bug. Hm. Okay. I can do this.