It’s that time of year again.
HUBBY: (thwack!)
Look at all of them! There must be…. one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-TEN! TEN FLIES!
(thwack!)
HA! Now there are only nine!
Hubby got an electric fly swatter for his birthday last year, but recently confirmed that all it does is give a fly a temporary buzz. Who knew?
So he brought home some old-fashioned fly swatters, the better to kill with, my dear. He also decided it was time to initiate our sons into the sacred mysteries of fly extermination.
SQUIRT: (intones) Today, these flies will know their place. Today… they must die. (thwack!)
HUBBY: Damn straight. (thwack!) Remember to follow through on the downswing.
Unfortunately, Hubby might be an excellent fly assasin, but he’s lousy about the body disposal part. Apparently, that’s what his apprentices are for.
BONNIE: Yuck! If you kill it, clean it up!
HUBBY: (thwack!) Eight! Tiger, clean up the fly guts. (thwack!) HA! That one there is, like, in SIX pieces!
And it turns out there’s an art to proper fly swatting. According to Hubby, light flicks only stun the fly. To do the job right, you need to SMASH the critter.
TIGER: (alarmed) Don’t hit that one sitting on my Harry Potter book! (waves arms to scare off fly) Run, fly! Run!
HUBBY: (THWACK!)
TIGER: DAD!
I think it’s best to let Hubby hold the fort for a while so I can sprint over to my favorite virtual Mexican eatery, where the Margaritas are low carb and the chips contain no calories. We can eat all we want without remorse and there are no men waving fly swatters.
I’m a little late today, so I hope you saved me some chow. Say! some of you just came back from the Romance Writers of America annual conference! What’d you learn, guys?
11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearingadopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
Wow, Dennie! That’s some pretty impressive vocab! And, um, as we look these over, we can’t help but notice a theme.
It’s also known as the huge-ass jumpy that gets Two-Toes all worked up about saving kids having a wee bit of too much fun.
Kristen, of A-Mused Chaos, yet another RWA returnee, with even more new vocabulary words, like “huge-ass jumpies.”
So I don’t say anything, but then it’s really weighing on my mind, that he’s probably sitting over at his desk, thinking, “Jonathan’s a creepy urinater,” or he’s probably calling his friends and telling them.
Speaking of themes, here’s one of the odder little things that might happen in the workplace, according to Jonathan Jonson of Jonson Blog.
I’ve never heard him growl like he did. He was standing over me just after I got in bed. I swear the thought he was a huge rotty. Then he was up at the window trying to get out. I’d heard a noise just before that and was too damn scared to look at the window.
Whoa! It turns out Vanda‘s dog Spike is way more effective than the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch when dealing with the infamous English Hedgehog.
This morning I washed my hair, and as I was smooshing product through it, my eyes drifted to my widow’s peak. There, in the July sun, was a silver hair. Silver as sterling, poking out prominently between my reddish blond hair.
Lachlan of My So-Called Blog, for whom there is no dealing with the terrifying Silver Hair, unless it includes smooshing the contents of a box of Clairol No. 7R all over it.
Mom: “You sure you don’t want a puppy? I’ll bring him down to you. It’ll be no problem.”
Me: “You’re the devil.”
Mom: “It’ll be so much easier to train him on your tile floors than it will be when you get a house with carpet in a year.”
Me: “GET BACK, SATAN!”
Honey, whose mother moonlights as the Princess of Darkness.
Someone PLEASE can you tell me the ending? I saw up to the part where Logan refused to answer Jacks interrogation after Jack hijacked the presidents helicopter on the way to Palmers funeral, the marines came in and arrested Jack and that was the last bit i saw!!!
Hang in there, Michelle! We found an episode summary that should hold you over.
They are very popular here in the summer and are often served with, or in, a brioche. It’s great fun comparing the different textures – ranging from grainy to extremely melty – in the various bars [which I do only in the interest of blog research, of course!]
Welshcakes Limoncello, and pictures of several yummy reasons to visit Sicily.
Ah, Logan’s Run. Almost more action, 70’s mall shots, skiffy goodness, and partial nudity than a single-digit-aged Greg could handle.
Greg van Eekhout of Writing and Snacks, whose mom must’ve been a little more lenient about movies than ours was.
He has permanent strands of drool that never actually fall, but only waggle as he shakes his preposterous head.
Nope, Exclamation Mark has NOT yet met Mojo. He only writes like he has, especially if he’s watched Reptilicus recently.
I got pissed and told him not to even go there. That I’ve been making gravy since I was 8 years old (that’s for at least 42 years in case you are wondering). I also told him that I always use a tablespoon and that he knew for a fact that I don’t ever put lumpy gravy in front of him. That I can make gravy as good as anyone else including his mama.
Why you should never approach Wander‘s gravy saucepan with a fork.
Now there’s something you don’t see everyday.
Screamwriter, speaking not of gravy, but of one shapely movie poster lass, sporting an equally shapely machine gun leg.
You know the type – Love Goddesses Unleashed!! – Desire !! Temptation !! Blaze !! Heat !!
Have read two of them.
Ho.
Hum.
Bernita Harris, whose reading material is a little spicier than ours is lately.
Words spoken by one nitwit on the local news. “Who knew these clouds could hold so much water?”
Well, duh, anyone who’s taken high school science? Clouds are made of what? Ya big maroon.
The prickly Pat Kirby, who does not suffer television weathermen gently.
Spiky and Goofy bailed. It’s not entirely clear why. A lot of grunting and a few noises that sounded like girlfriend and job and car emanated from Teenager’s Stinky Palace this evening.
Elizabeth of Plein Air Sketches, and why we Southern Californians can come out of hiding now.
“I am never loved, these people abuse me, they never give me milkbones, just look at my sad eyes”.
And then he will proceded to lay his head on your lap and look up at you with his sad brown eyes. He milkes it for all he is worth.
Laurel Wreath‘s dog, Tug, who uses the same approach on hedgehogs that he does on dinner guests.
And for those of you who’ve stayed through until the very end, here’s a cool little dance routine done completely on treadmills and all in one take. These guys are amazing!
I know! The flies here have been AWFUL!
Fly-swatting – one of my few skills.
I got tired of cleaning up bug guts when I get my annual fly infestation around the end of August, so I carry around household pest control spray and play the game of “Spray the Fly” instead of “Swat the fly.” Then I follow with the vacuum sweeper if necessary. I suspect I’d deal with this problem differently if I had children and/or pets, in which case I’d a) be more concerned with their health in the face of pest control spray, and b) have a lot less time to try and spray the flies.
Happy swatting! 🙂
That video is incredible! You put up such good dance ones. Is there a special category over at youtube.com for them?
All my kids LOVED the video =)). You have flies, we have these things called “love-bugs” that make you try to explain…. what they are doing while flying around attached…. to your young children =))
Lovely fly swatting reporting. It sounds oh so familiar. 😀
Two-toes is considering adding flies to his eradication plan if he gets a break in wasp/yellow jacket hunting.
Great video. The kids loved it.
Honey, what about spiders? 😉
never mind. figured it out.
Now wait a minute – if the guys at the virtual Mexican place are hot let them swing away baby! – sorry – getting all caught up in my stories . . . teehee!
Hi, guys! Dennie, you’re still partying!
M.G., I like to browse through YouTube until I find what I like. Google Video has gotten kind of randy, so if I find anything there it’s usually because I let VideoSift find it for me. This video came straight from YouTube, though.
Bleah! Laurel Wreath! It’s bad enough to have flying insects in the house, but flying insects doing the wild thing is too much. Take it outside, guys!
I think Laurel Wreath needs to call up Honey and her vaccuum cleaner. Heh! Honey, you are VERY thorough.
Speaking of spiders, Kristen, I opened a blind yesterday and found the window covered in webs, with lots of dead bug corpses in it. Yuck! Being the stellar housekeeper that I am, I closed the blind.
April, I remember Texan flies. They are HUGE. All the bugs in Texas are humongous. The worst ones were the bag worms. They killed all our junipers.
You have more than a few skills, Bernita. I wish I could be as skill-less as you are!
We had a fund raiser for the little league football team. Smoking and selling 243 slabs of pork ribs. This fund raiser attracted every fly within 30 miles. We sure could have used your husband yesterday. Instead we enlisted little leaguers who job was solely to shoo away flies in shifts for 8 hours. We made over $2200!
We came back from a vacation once to find hundreds of newly hatched flies in the stairwell leading down to the basement. New flies are dumb; they just sat there and didn’t even try to escape the vacuum cleaner nozzle. Mimi made sure I understood that she would not be emptying that particular vacuum cleaner bag when it was full.
Wow! Kelly! You made $200 more than I did at my snack bar! Even with the onslaught of flies! I bow to thee…
Heh, Dave! I did use a shop vac on bugs once… when we had a plague of bag worms in Texas. All over the yard, over every surface (bbq, hose holder, dog house, etc.) were little bags with a caterpillar in them. There must have been millions!
The inside of the shop vac was really nasty afterward, though.
Love you Bonnie, thanks heaps i’m all caught up!! 😉
The flies have been awful this year. We even had flies back in February when the temps here in Arkansas were in the 80’s for a couple of days.