Swarms

Clint came home late on Halloween and went upstairs to change. He called me upstairs saying he had a surprise and then placed two ladybugs in my hands.

"They're good luck," he said. "Go throw them outside."

I ran down the stairs and threw them out the front door and felt good for saving the cute little, lucky bugs. Mom should appreciate that this is a drastic improvement over my fascination with their wings when I was a small child but we really don't need to go into that. As soon as I got back inside Clint found two more which he bravely caught and released back to the wild. At this he pronounced that he "got all of them".
It turns out we must be really "lucky" because the ladybugs are everywhere! They are in our living room, the bedroom, my shower..... We have swarms of ladybugs crawling all over our house! (Gwen I know what you are thinking...they DO exist outside of California).
Just as I had resigned myself to living in the Lucky House until this crazy phase has past, I found that we had another intruder!! Wasps!!!!
I came home from voting (it took four hours) and put Addy down for a nap and sat down in the living room. I noticed one wasp on the floor and immediately swatted it to death with a piece of junk mail. I would not be cradling these suckers in my hands with love and releasing them out the front door. Then I looked up and saw one crawling up the window. I smashed it against the glass and thought I'd clean it up with the vacuum cleaner. As I suck up the body I saw two more flying around the same window so I gulped them up into the belly of the cleaner and then checked the other windows for more unwanted guests. By the time I was done I had killed a dozen wasps!!!
Clint thinks they flew in threw the flue so we lit a fire last night and hopefully the rest of the colony has been smoked out. I've decided the lady bugs are not lucky since they brought along some very scary guests!


Update: The body count is now 13.