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Small Scale Triumphs & Tragedies
NexusSix
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Registered User regular
I've been debating since last night whether or not I should start this thread, but I figured, WTF.
This is a thread for what--in the big "real" world would be considered trivial (possibly banal)--but something that had an impact on you personally. Little stories that you have personal feelings about, but that don't really mean anything in the big picture.
Example (and true story):
My wife and I love our front porch. I mean, we really fucking love our front porch. At the start of each spring, we go through our routine of getting it cleaned up and looking all purty. Flowers, plants and herbs are purchased in mass quantities. Snazy exterior candleholders are put out, along with, y'know, candles. The porch furniture is dusted off and cleaned well. Massive new playlists are put together for the iPod.
Our front porch is a second room for us when the weather is nice. Our butts are usually parked out there from early April until well into November (last year we spent New Year's Eve on the porch). Lots of wine and beer is consumed, friends are invited over, great conversations and laughs are had.
Around May of this year, we noticed we had a guest. A tiny, teeny, itsy bitsy spider--she wasn't much bigger than the tip of a pen. Yeah, normally, we don't suffer spiders. Arachnids are quickly and efficiently exterminated if found inside of the house. But this little girl was outside, not harming anything, and far too small to do any type of bite damage to our pets even if she was inside.
We've spent the last couple of months watching her spin her web; rebuild after windy thunderstorms. She found an awesome perch between one of our hanging baskets and a hanging candleholder. Moisture looked very cool on her web, and she happened to be in just the right spot where you could see her elegent little home right at sunset. She came to be our guest and we were really rooting for her even though we never saw her catch much prey. She must've been doing something right, though, as she at least doubled (maybe tripled) in size since we first noticed her.
Last night fucking sucked.
Again, I was out on the front porch with the wife and noticed a yellowjacket buzzing around our humming bird feeder. This bastard did a few quick orbits around the porch, and then slammed like a proton torpedo directly into her web. We saw the filaments rip out and float down to the porch. Then, we saw the yellowjacket land on the eave where our spider usually hung out during the day to take refuge from the sun. The yellojacket sat there for a couple of seconds, and then dusted off. We had hoped that maybe she was knocked into the hanging basket, and that we'd find her this morning repairing her web. No such luck. So, since last night and this morning, I've just been wondering if the yellowjacket killed her, ate her, or took her back to its hive for larvae consumption.
Stupid little spider that had no impact on anything in the world? Yeah, I suppose. But I think we'll miss her and the porch will probably be a bit melancholy for a while.
So let's hear it. I know you folks have some similar stories--happy, sad or somewhere in between. Preferably, a happy/funny one now that I've posted my emo bullshit. :P
This is a thread for what--in the big "real" world would be considered trivial (possibly banal)--but something that had an impact on you personally. Little stories that you have personal feelings about, but that don't really mean anything in the big picture.
Example (and true story):
My wife and I love our front porch. I mean, we really fucking love our front porch. At the start of each spring, we go through our routine of getting it cleaned up and looking all purty. Flowers, plants and herbs are purchased in mass quantities. Snazy exterior candleholders are put out, along with, y'know, candles. The porch furniture is dusted off and cleaned well. Massive new playlists are put together for the iPod.
Our front porch is a second room for us when the weather is nice. Our butts are usually parked out there from early April until well into November (last year we spent New Year's Eve on the porch). Lots of wine and beer is consumed, friends are invited over, great conversations and laughs are had.
Around May of this year, we noticed we had a guest. A tiny, teeny, itsy bitsy spider--she wasn't much bigger than the tip of a pen. Yeah, normally, we don't suffer spiders. Arachnids are quickly and efficiently exterminated if found inside of the house. But this little girl was outside, not harming anything, and far too small to do any type of bite damage to our pets even if she was inside.
We've spent the last couple of months watching her spin her web; rebuild after windy thunderstorms. She found an awesome perch between one of our hanging baskets and a hanging candleholder. Moisture looked very cool on her web, and she happened to be in just the right spot where you could see her elegent little home right at sunset. She came to be our guest and we were really rooting for her even though we never saw her catch much prey. She must've been doing something right, though, as she at least doubled (maybe tripled) in size since we first noticed her.
Last night fucking sucked.
Again, I was out on the front porch with the wife and noticed a yellowjacket buzzing around our humming bird feeder. This bastard did a few quick orbits around the porch, and then slammed like a proton torpedo directly into her web. We saw the filaments rip out and float down to the porch. Then, we saw the yellowjacket land on the eave where our spider usually hung out during the day to take refuge from the sun. The yellojacket sat there for a couple of seconds, and then dusted off. We had hoped that maybe she was knocked into the hanging basket, and that we'd find her this morning repairing her web. No such luck. So, since last night and this morning, I've just been wondering if the yellowjacket killed her, ate her, or took her back to its hive for larvae consumption.
Stupid little spider that had no impact on anything in the world? Yeah, I suppose. But I think we'll miss her and the porch will probably be a bit melancholy for a while.
So let's hear it. I know you folks have some similar stories--happy, sad or somewhere in between. Preferably, a happy/funny one now that I've posted my emo bullshit. :P
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NexusSix on
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This thread has become insect/arachinid heavy.
Yeah that doesn't really make sense.
I actually go out of my way to avoid stepping on slugs in my back yard. I always thought this was a cool Peaceful Warrior-type thing to do and that I'm scoring some massive karma multipliers on my way to Moksha, but then my wife brought this up a party one night and everybody looked at me like I was some filthy Woodstock hippie covered in mud and my own feces.
I was hoping for a story about somebody saving baby ducks from a sewer or something. I have failed.
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-ULTIMA RATIO REGUM-
"Why would you want to smash me for no apparent reason?"
"You do it to bugs, don't you?"
"...ok, fair enough."
I figure there's a pretty decent chance this is how I'll die.
For some reason I did make an exception for a beetle I saw ambling across my mantlepiece, but then he wasn't flying around my computer or landing on my TV screen.
Even Rollie Pollies?
I don't feel the need to kill anything unless it's trying to kill me. If my wife finds a bug in the house I usually just scoop them up in a cup and put them back outside.
Except mosquitos and ticks; those bastards can die a horrible firey death!
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I had to look that up - we call them woodlice - and yes, them too. I cut off their heads and put them on tiny splinters to scare of other wee beasties who atempt to enter my domain. :twisted:
See, I'm not going to fuck with anything that's big enough to try and kill me. Fortunately there's shit all in England that'll do that.
I think you can wait a few days before you give up hope; it may take the spider some time to get back into repair mode. She may have to replace some base strands where you can't see, etc. Also, am I right in thinking that web-hunting spiders relying pretty much exclusively on their webs to kill the prey? By this I mean I doubt she was close enoguh to the wasp to be attacked by it, and even though the wasp got away I'm sure the spider's threads were impeding its flight. With luck she'll come back, and maybe she'll pick a new spot.
Mosquitoes are simply a bane on all living things. I wish there were more dragonflies to counteract, but they never seem to flourish in my area.
Ants on the other hand are fucking everywhere. I have a large yard and they call it their kingdom. They even have a "Capitol Hill" over in a small (failed) garden area. Their hive actually sticks out of the ground a bit.
I need them to die because they're starting to come into the house in small numbers (spotting one ant here and there).
I haven't really gotten around to it yet, but I will.
Two possible solutions for your ants, which don't involve killing em. I thinks.
As a kid, I used to mix up "bug potions" which was basically random things I found around the house and yard, and usually some windex or something. A few of these recipes I found did kill the ants (or so I thought at the time) so I started experimenting with em. Eventually I got to the point where I found that the wild garlic stuff we had growing in our yard was something the ants hated. I would pull up a handful, find one of the many many ant hills in the yard, kick it a bit to rile em up and expose some tunnels, and drop the garlic on them. In a few hours, I'd go back and the ants would be moving sluggishly. The next day, they would all be gone. Completely empty hill. By the time I was 14, I'd managed to make our yard an ant free zone. As far as I know, at least as of when I graduated high school, it still is.
For indoor ants, at the house I live now, I had a bunch of problems with sugar ants coming into the house. If you can find and seal their common points of entry, do so. Then wipe down the trails with vinegar or alcohol, or both, to try and kill the scent. That works fairly well. We also found that a package of garam masala (tasty indian spice) seems to drive them off pretty well. I figure much like the garlic thing as child, they must not like the smell.