Oh, I do so love the seasons. In the winter, it’s the mice, looking to make themselves snug and cozy in our basement. Dry summer brings seething hordes of Oriental cockroaches in search of the moisture they need to stay alive. Incidentally, say “water bugs” if you want, folks, but that doesn’t make ’em any less cockroaches. A roach is a roach and those fuckers are Blatta orientalis, otherwise known as the Oriental cockroach. An insect, not a bug, and no “water” about them–they feed upon decomposing organic matter. But I digress….

I know that in spite of that miserable furbag of a groundhog, spring has indeed sprung, and I know because the swarmer termites are out and about. The first time I saw literally hundreds of them crawling on the outside of the house one day, I nearly had a fucking heart attack because I knew they weren’t just flying ants, but had no idea what they might actually be–I’d always thought termites were white! Anyway, some kind soul (maybe on our board–dunno) identified them from a picture as swarmer termites, and a call to the poor, put-upon pest control guy here in town (he gets a call every time I find some pest insect and don’t know how to tell whether we’re infested) revealed that merely seeing them on the outside of the house didn’t mean you HAD them, it just meant there was a nest somewhere nearby that was large enough for some of the insects to start thinking about settling in a new home. I think they just may have (though it could be they’re coming in through the horrendous cracks in this ancient and leaky foundation), and I suppose that means I should at least have the landlord come and take a look, but I won’t. I’d cheerfully call an exterminator myself, but they’d have a fit because they’re control freaks; how many people create lease agreements that specify cupboards must be cleaned with Murphy’s Oil Soap (I use generic just to be disobedient) and that carpets must be cleaned yearly by a specific (named) company? Well, they did, but even that’s not so bad, and I might still give them a heads-up and put up with his poking about for a week or two, but there’s something else.

Last year, when they were cleaning this siding and the house next door (I helped), I happened to notice that there were a lot of yellowjackets around. I’m allergic to stings, and when I found the wasps were coming from beneath the porch of the house next door, through a big crack in the concrete, I showed them. I said there had to be a nest in there, and I explained that I am allergic to stings. Both he and his wife sort of agreed, and I figured I’d see the old guy out and about in the next week or so with some kind of flying insect spray, shooting it through the crack (some genius built both these houses with the area under the concrete porches entirely closed off in concrete blocks–party time for roaches AND yellowjackets), but weeks passed and I saw nothing. I thought, “Okay, you fuckers, that’s fine. I can’t spray because that’s not the house we rent, and I can’t call anyone because you’re so anal that you insisted on being here when we wanted an extra cable line because you wanted to specify where the hole was drilled, but I’m going to find a way to get fucking even with you no matter whether I ever get stung or not”. Find a way I have–if there are termites chomping away on the house, I’m going to pay as much attention to them as they did to the yellowjackets that I clearly explained could kill me if I had not access to an EpiPen. Hah, you lazy anal-retentive bastards–stick that in your cellulose and chew it.