Battle of the Bugs...

More ant bites today.  Somethings up.  The ants might have caught wind of my plans and devised their own devious little plans to bite back.  They know 'the Big Guy' is onto them, and maybe they wanna get onto the big guy.  Curiously, I think I've been bitten in my house, either in my bed or watching TV.  I did find a dead spider that could have been the couch culprit.  Or maybe the ants are finding another way in.  I've watched the dogs around the yard, brushing up against the trees and bushes, maybe the ants are hopping on the big Trojan Dog to sneak in past the poison.  Whatever it is, I seem to be the only one around here getting bitten and I'm getting annoyed. 

I have identified some of my attackers as Fire Ants, and they are the tiniest little ants ever.  Tiny angry ants that pack a really wicked venomous punch.  I've never seen them on me, I just know after the fact that I've been bitten.  I don't think I'll be wearing sandals to do my yardwork anymore.

I never did mention the bugs here in Vegas.  In particular, the cockroaches.  We laughed when we left Canada and the mosquito-land behind.  There are no mosquitos, blackflies, or any of those flying-biting insects here.  What we have are the creepy crawlies.  Cockroaches, scorpions, and the deadly Black Widow.  Haven't seen any snakes yet, but there are signs out in the hills to beware of rattlesnakes.  In our apartment complex out in Henderson, it was the cockroaches that gave us the creeps the most.  They were in abundance from May til August.  At dark you'd walk down the walkway and see their shadows scurrying to get out of your way.  Look in the grass and they're there by the hundreds.  Most were about the size of your thumb-knuckle, but they were pretty much harmless.  Our neighbor used to spray the poison around the perimeter of our ground floor apartments so anything that found its way inside was either dead or dying.  Still, there'd usually be one waiting at our front door and we'd have to shoo it away and get in quickly.  I don't think we'll have them here at the new place because we don't have grass.  Roaches like wet conditions.

These days it is the houseflies that I'm doing battle with, along with the ants.  A couple of weeks ago their population exploded and we have been inundated with the buggers ever since.  The neighbors next door have two large dogs and don't really clean up the dogshit in the backyard, so I think that's helping their population, AND making it a little disgusting when the wind drifts our way.  The dogshit is baked rock hard pretty quickly here, so its pretty easy to clean up.  I don't know why anyone would rather live with it there than pick it up but some people just live dirty.  Back at the apartment I got really fed up with people not picking up their dogpoo and one day I stuck a sign in the ground beside a large pile of it that said "Filthy Humans!  Pick up your shit!"  The sign, and the poo, were gone not long after.  These houseflies though, they just keep coming and coming.  I'm killing them by the hundreds with my trusty ol' weapon of mass destruction, the 'M-D'OR Super-Swatter', Made in Quebec.  It wasn't always a super-swatter, its been modified to become the killing machine it has.

Which brings to mind a battle I had back in Riverview at the old house with the bees.  I don't like killing bees.  They are an essential part of our ecosystem and they are an at risk species.  If we lose the bees, then our food chain will collapse.  There is nothing in nature that can do the job that the bees do for us.  But on this occasion, I was forced into making a stand.  It was an excellent spot for a nest, somewhere under the house beneath the mud room where there was no foundation.  But the bees became really pesky and took over.  We would be sitting out front on our patio and all these bees kept coming in at us.  We'd get agitated, then they'd get agitated and put the run to us.  For a while we stopped using the patio, but that wasn't right.  Something had to be done.

I sat out one day and let the bees come in to me.  They won't hurt you if you don't try to kill them, but if you try and miss then they'll attack.  I watched, and each one buzzed around a bit then made their lumbering way down to the floorboards, landed and crawled under.  I thought that was kinda strange, that the bees were going under there, so I ripped up a few boards and watched to see where they were going.  With the gap opened, the bees just hovered down into the hole, and onto a spot in the insulation where a hole was burrowed and then crawled in through the hole.

"Holy Fuck!", I thought, "there's a bees nest under my mud room!"

All sorts of things went through my head as to how to go about this.  There was probably about two and a half feet clearance under that section of the house, so not much wrigglin' space for me especially if I was trying to take out a bees nest.  I tried to convince my 12 year old Little Brother (BBBS Canada) to go under and get it, I even had my old Ghostbusters trench suit from Halloween 1998 for him to wear but he wouldn't do it.  And so I was left with a dilemna.  Rip up the floor of the mudroom?  Get the Exterminators?

What I decided upon doing was to convince the bees that this was a bad place for them to live.  I set up on the front patio with my guitar, my new swatter, and a few Pumphouse Scotch Ales and set about the killing.  After a few swats and misses and scrambles, I realized my weapon was just not up to par for the task of killing bees.  It was too whippy and I was missing the mark and making the bees angry at me.  So I went into the workshop and reinforced the swatter down the sides with the steel of two cut up coat hangers in order to make it super-stiff, all wrapped up in duct tape.  Now, my precision M-D'OR Super-Swatter was ready for killin'.  A whole new ballgame.  That day I killed a few, but not nearly enough to convince the hive to leave.  But the weapon was a deadly killin' machine now.  I was ready for battle.

Days passed and one day I noticed that just before the rain, all the bees came home.  One by one they all came in from the rain to take cover.  I wasn't killin' that day, just observing their behaviour.  I took note and watched the forecast for the next rainy day, and then I set up my ambush.

The sky grew dull and rain was neigh.  I was a little giddy even, knowing what was to come.  I took a swig from my warm Scotch Ale and waited, with my guitar over my lap and the super-swatter leaned against my thigh.  The sky started dropping and then they came, one by one, burdened by their heavy load and trying to avoid the raindrops.  The funny thing I figured out about a bee is, that if you swing and miss it the first time, the bee will veer away about 10feet as if to say "What the F...???", get its bearings and its hairy eyes fixed on its attacker, and then strike angrily back in a beeline towards its target.  This, is the folly of their nature.  I didn't always get them on the first strike, but I never missed that beeline target coming straight at me for the second swing.  I must have killed 50 bees that day, 60% of those kills were in this hostile angry beeline fashion.

My plan worked, as far as I know.  I killed whatever remained of them all summer, and their numbers were so dwindled that they did not return.

Truthfully, I do feel bad about that.  I don't like killing nature.  Especially bees.  They're a small but important part of our ecosystem that we cannot do without, and we are killing them off.  Like many other parts of our food chain, our species is destroying the fine balance of our ecosystem by sheer ambivalence and ignorance to what is happening on our planet.  A slow, collective, profitable suicide.  We tend to see ourselves as somehow on the outside of this ecological equation, that our planet is and always will be there to serve our needs.  That we are somehow exempt from being just another organism at risk because we are human.  What a dangerous idea.  Time is going to play out awfully for humanity if we don't start paying attention to what we are doing and who we elect to run our governments. 

WE are the invasive species here, not the bugs.  And if we choose not to be part of the ecological equation and continue to destroy the fine balance of our planet, then Mother Nature will most assuredly take its course to get rid of the problem.  We will lose everything, and the bugs will win.

Thanks for reading.

TRJ

•••


Plea for the Sacred Headwaters, British Columbia.

Please take a moment to read this and sign this petition.  Every name helps.

Shell Oil has a big plan, backed by the Harper government to enter the Sacred Headwaters in Northwestern British Columbia and begin drilling for oil using hydro-fracking, a destructive process that involves pumping chemicals into the ground in order to bring oil to the surface.  In a sensitive environment such as the headwaters of three major river systems, doesn't this seem a bit insane???  Doesn't the name SACRED mean anything?  That's where they will begin fracking if the Harper government is not stopped.  WE are the only thing standing in the way of this happening, so please lend your voice to this cause and let Harper know that we will not be passive bystanders to the destruction of Canada's wilderness. 

Thank you.

We have landed...

We have finally landed!  Up until now we have been living in an apartment complex in Henderson but we knew it was only a temporary situation, Tanya was on the hunt for a house before we were even unpacked.  The search took 2 months, and then the business end took 2 months to complete.  But finally, we are now officially living in Las Vegas!

It feels like I've been in a constant state of moving since February of last year.  Getting the house in Riverview fixed up for sale and that whole process, then packing, then picking up and moving into a temporary place for a while, and then moving again into here.  What a long, drawn out process.  Hopefully this stopover will be for a while.  Now its back to fixing things up, buying new stuff, unpacking and getting settled.  Its so nice to have my own space again, I can breathe easy and sing out loud... AND play electric guitar out loud too!  One thing is for sure, the neighbors know I have arrived :) 

The house is great.  Its old, 1989, which is old for Vegas.  It felt good the first time we walked in, like this was our place.  Its not a huge house but its cozy and laid out nicely with lots of open space.  There are tiled floors throughout the main floor, a big vaulted ceiling in the living room for entertaining (with a fully mirrored wall), lots of light can come in through interior-shuttered windows, a sitting/TV room which is open to the kitchen, marble countertops, 3 bedrooms on the second floor, 2.5 bathrooms, a big garage and a backyard with a pool and a hottub.  Enough rooms for me to have my 'office/music/chaos room' and Tanya, who is better at keeping her project rooms tidier, will get the guest bedroom for all her knitting and spinning stuff.  We are about an 8 minute drive to the Strip and not far from all our needs.  Not far, still meaning we have to drive to get there.  Nothing is close in Las Vegas.  But we are close enough to the action so that it will be a much cheaper cab ride to get home when we end up down on the Strip with visitors.  We already know there will be lots of people coming into town and stopping over with us so being able to get back from the Strip was important for us.  We want our place to be a good hosting spot too, nice enough just to hang out at the pool if we don't feel like going anywhere.  We can see the lights of the Strip from our bedroom window, so that's kinda cool.  Its going to be great!  

The pool was the one thing we really wanted to have here.  We're still consistently hitting the 100F (38C) every day so its still really hot here.  Neither of us have ever had a pool before so its pretty cool.  Our pool guy tells us that our pool is quite unique, a glass-tiled mosaic pool with custom tile work on the bottom, maybe one in a thousand pools are like this.  Somebody spent a lot of money to have it installed and it is a gorgeous piece of work, with an in-floor cleaning system.  Mind you, its showing its age.  In the fall I am going to learn how to replace missing tiles and do some maintenance.  Its not a huge pool either, just big enough for Tanya and I to get in and frolick around a bit to get cooled off, and we've been enjoying it pretty much every day since we moved in.  At night the lighted pool and the hot tub are awesome.  Sitting in our backyard with the warm Vegas night air all around us, watching the planes lit up like stars circling to land at the McCarren Airport, the golden hue of the city lighting the sky and the big, spotlit sky-beam of the Luxor shining its beacon straight up into the heavens.  It didn't feel like Vegas where we were living in Henderson.  It felt desert'y, but it was like living in a park, outside of the vibration of the city.  Here, in our backyard at night, you can see it and you can feel the energy.  Its close. 

The backyard is big enough for the dogs to roam but there is no grass, only crushed rock.  We have a small stone patio but its not nearly big enough for our needs.  I've got big plans for our backyard but first we have to see what the water situation will be like back there.  We also have a lot of plants and trees on the property which makes the backyard semi-private.  We have neighbors to the sides of us but none in back.  There is a city drainage-wash in back of us so its open to see across the city's rooftops right over to the mountains on the far edge of town.  All of the plants have been terribly neglected for over a year so there's lots of trimming and cleaning up to do.  I like that kinda stuff so I'm game for it, although I'll add that I'm currently suffering from being stupid and not protecting myself better from the nature of the desert. 

My favorite tree is our pine tree.  It was terribly bushy and rusty looking from all the dead needles and branches that had gotten caught up in itself.  So I mounted it and gave it her a little TBone Special TLC, trimming her back and shaking the hell out of it to get rid of all the dead needles.  It looked great when it was all cleaned up.  Then I got cocky and decided to trim up the palm tree with the saw on my Swiss army knife.  You'd think palm trees were friendly, given how they just sit there looking pretty with those big sweeping, green leaves, swaying in the breeze.  But to my astonishment, this tree's long limbs were lined with sharp, jagged teeth not unlike those of a shark.  Deadly.  I can't find the actual name of the tree, but some have called it a Sharktooth Palm.  Yep.  I got a few good chomps on my hands and head but stubbornly kept going til the job was finished.  Beer does that to ya.  Lesson learned... kinda.  I was also warned, after the fact, that scorpions like to hide out in palm trees.  Good to know.

A few days ago I tackled the Pineapple Palm in front of our house.  Again, with such an elegant name you'd think 'Friendly Tree' right?  Oh that Pineapple Palm.  What a mean bitch!  I know now why people pay people to come and do these things.  At least for this session I had purchased some hardy leather gloves and a professional pruning saw.  But I should have worn headgear and a body suit, and I especially should have worn goggles for the task.  The Pineapple Palm has deadly wooden spikes, 6" to 24" in length.  Palms are super efficient trees, and as new leaves grow on top, the limbs on the bottom die off and become the hardened bark of the tree.  And in this tree's case, the slender interior leaves turn to wood as well and become menacing wooden spikes.  This tree hadn't been groomed in a long while, I faced the dangerous task of crawling under it to trim it up.  I'm sure the experts use mechanical tools for this and don't crawl under it.  I got poked everywhere!  Bloodied again, right through the leather into my hands, into the top of my head, my ear, legs and ass!

But I'll tell ya, my worst experience so far has been with my good ol' friends the ants.  They are the tiniest little ants I've ever seen, so I never paid them much attention rather than to say, 'Holy, look at all the ants!'  We knew there were ants around, even when we looked at buying the house there were ant traps everywhere.  I knew I'd be battling them, so it was no great surprise when we found the little suckers searching our cupboard for food.  I laid out some poison that fried their raiding parties, sprayed the perimeter of the house with more poison, and set about destroying their habitats wherever I can.  The battle is on!  I've fought ants before, you never win.  But I have to at least try to keep them on the outside of the house.

I just wasn't dressed for it, shorts, sandals, shortsleeve t-shirt.  I was dressed for the weather not the task at hand when I decided to trim back some of the flowers and tackle the bushes.  There was a foot of debris, dead leaves and such built up within the bushes which was impossible to get to with a rake, and so I went in, all Rambo-ish with my gloved hands and bare arms to accomplish the task of sweeping out all the dead stuff and cutting out the dead branches.  When it was done my arms were all scraped to hell.  I didn't consider the scrapes to be much and it never occured to me that there were bites mixed in with those scratches.  I later realized a couple of my scratches were not scratches, but rashes.  Like a poison ivy rash, but not that bad as it was gone in a day.  But then the itching kept getting worse and I realized I was covered in bites.  I didn't know what had bitten me because I hadn't seen any of them.  But after two restless nights of increasing itchiness the bites became red welts, I did some research and found out I had been stung by ants.  I got some baking soda (the best thing you can do for a sting) and spent an hour neutralizing the poison from all my stings.  I counted 23 bites from my feet and up the back of my legs, a couple on my arms, and Tanya says there's 4 or 5 on my back.  I tell ya, I don't know ANYONE who has been bitten by ants as many times as I have!  I have so many ant bite stories, and usually, to tell the comedic truth, they were bites from ants who were trying to get out of my pants!!  Seriously, on three separate occasions I have had an ant, or ants, trapped in my pants and have tried to bite their way out.  Such is my life.  The Mountain Man likes to get into the wilderness and be one with nature, and sometimes I suffer for it.  Its all part of the adventure.


Cheers all, thanks for reading.

TRJ