The Birds and the Bees

This past weekend we had some unwanted guests. And no, I'm not talking about the in-laws. Although they do have this nasty habit of dropping by unannounced. Wait a minute, dropping by unannounced is something that your nosy neighbor down the street does, not people who live hundreds of miles away in Florida do.

In all fairness, we usually have a timetable of when to expect them when they visit. We'll be there anytime between Thursday of next week and tomorrow. Translation: we just want to keep you on your toes.

They usually give us the heads up on their arrival by calling us from down the street with the greeting of "We're here!" and I'm busily hiding dirty dishes in the oven, picking up laundry off the floor, and putting away the millions of Barbie doll accessories scattered about the place in a wicked fervor.

But I digress, the unwelcome guests.

Well, these unwelcome guests dropped in on Thursday as I was watching my weekly dose of Survivor. I noticed that a bug kept knocking into my light overhead and making this click, click click noise everytime. Turns out it was a ladybug. Since ladybugs are rumored to be "good" insects because they eat all the "bad" insects I didn't want to squash this cute little ladybug. I will mention that no, I'm not a card carrying member of PETA, but I do like all creatures great and small. So, I will do my best to "rescue" bugs by getting them into a plastic cup, covering it with my hand, and mercifully releasing the said bug back into the wild where he/she is free to fly and buzz to freedom, or get caught in the big spider web. Here I was missing the Jamie and Bobby Jon male posturing showdown and I'm distracted with rescuing a ladybug. I sit down again and I hear the annoying click, click, click again. You see, ladybug's have hard shells so every time it hit the light it made the annoying sound. Turns out there was a whole colony of ladybugs congregating around this light. I gave up at that point.

The ladybugs have now taken over my bottom floor. They're on the blinds, on the ceiling, on the walls, and in the corners. My mom googled "ladybug infestation" and found that evidently this is a common problem. The ladybug, whose reputation as a "good" bug resulted in an importation of them which in turn led to ladybug overpopulation, will search for a warm place to lay low for the winter, and hence the issue at hand. You could buy these products over the internet that will solve the problem or you could hire an exterminator. Or you could just accept them as roommates.

All this talk about ladybugs reminds me of the softball league I played in when I was about 8 or 9. It was in the days before fast pitch softball. This girl's league, the equivalent of Little League baseball for boys, consisted of four teams. And instead of ferocious and intimidating names like the Pirates or the Tigers we had cute little girl names for our teams.

There were the Ladybugs, the Grasshoppers, the Butterflies, and the Blue Jays.

I played on the Blue Jays. I suppose the recreation league budget for little girls' softball league was underfunded because we had the cheesiest uniforms. They consisted of blue t-shirts with a silk screen of our name across the front of the shirt and ball caps with the big white felt iron on letters.

The Blue Jays had the distinction of having the letters "BJ" ironed on our caps.

It was years later that I learned the alternate meaning of this abbreviation and that we were walking around with THAT on our caps!