What Happens When I Stay Up Late To Read a Book
A small bug crawling up the wall. What is that? A tick?
Closer inspection confirms that it is probably not a tick. But, I’m still not convinced. It has some weird long thing that comes out of it’s head. It’s tiny though.
Squash. Flush. Move on.
Oh. There’s his friend. Must be looking for him. Okay friend, I’ll show you where your buddy went.
Squash. Flush. Move on.
Jesus, is that another one? Good lord. Squash. Drop in toilet. Pee on top of it for good measure while silently praying it doesn’t craw up the side of the bowl and bite my girl parts. Having a penis would come in really handy right now. Not just for aim, but for visibility and for maintaining a distance from the enemy.
Urinate. Flush. Move on.
Check girl parts. Confirm they are weevil-free.
Return to couch.
Feel very itchy.
Text Real Estate Dad, who is upstairs asleep, to alert him to this man-job he will need to attend to in the morning.
Back to book. Cannot concentrate. Realize that Real Estate Dad’s answer in the morning will be “Well the exterminator just came yesterday, so next month when he comes we can tell him.”
Urgency. Not Real Estate Dad’s forte. Further evidenced by the fact that a) he stopped for coffee when I was waiting for him to quickly walk Sammy so we could go to the hospital because my cervix was crowning with Chubs’s head roaring through and b) he never once broke into a run for any of the events during the morning from hell where I went from “Am I in labor?” while in my nice warm bed to laying in an ambulance with a huge firefighter squeezing my hand, to “Who wants to hold her first” in a hospital half way across the city in a span of 70 minutes.
Reality hits. I need to handle this bug thing myself. Google black bug with long head and body with two shell-like parts. Choose images and begin scrolling.
After seeing every kind of tick, beetle and bedbug, I spy one that might be our new resident. The grain weevil. Okay. Let’s see what the grain weevil’s story is.
Grain weevil likes grain. Go figure. Enjoys rice and cereals. Especially fond of bird seeds.
Thinks to self: Like the bag of bird seed sitting by the front door? The bag I’d been trying to get rid of for a year when someone (that’s you, sleeping Real Estate Dad) went and bought another giant ba? All so the girls could feed the birds. I hate birds.
I realize my hatred of birds flies in the face of me being a lover and rescuer of animals. (Flies in the face – see what I did there?) But, birds are absolutely not a topic of love in my diary. They fly around, dropping a turd whenever and wherever the hell they feel, whether that be in my freshly keratined hair, on a woman’s bridal gown, or in a news reporter’s mouth – like an old man at a nursing home who sharts and laughs because someone else has to clean it up. Birds wake everyone up at 4 a.m., singing like those obnoxious ROTC’s in college, trying to make sure the rest of us are also awake and miserable while they sing their way through morning bootcamp. I’d love to be able to pick off those Mockingbirds who divebomb me, the kids and the dogs when we are only trying to leave our house. No one cares about your stupid nest and your eggs you ugly birds! There. I hate birds. I said it. I do not want to encourage them to hang around our house. AT ALL.
When the girls put seed out for the birds, the birds aren’t even grateful. They hover around, squawking at each other like the nail techs at the salon, make a damned mess, leaving shit all over our porch and spew seeds and shells all over the patio. And do they even clean up any of the edible seeds? No. They’re too good to eat seeds from the ground. They only want them from the feeder. The corgis, trying to be helpful, run out there like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet to inhale the seeds all over the ground. Then for the next 3 days, the corgi firing squad is in high demand by capital punishment states, because of their ability to shoot bird seed straight out of their asses.
It’s 2 a.m. I cautiously walked over to the bucket of bird seed in the bag by the front door and opened it up. I grabbed the cup in there and scooped up some seed. I waited for all the little kernels to fall into place and for the seeds to stop moving so I could determine if there were any bugs in the bag.
And then, it was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The seeds never stopped moving because there were weevils everywhere!
Vom vom vom. I unlocked our door faster than I would have if Ed McMahon was standing out there with a Publisher’s Clearing House check in one hand and a basket full of corgi puppies in the other. I ran outside in my pajamas in the pouring rain and threw that bag of nasty on the street.
I went inside and upstairs to report to Real Estate Dad what happened. He asked where the bag of seeds was now. I told him I threw it at the edge of the sidewalk in front of our house.
You’re welcome, Glover Park. Blame the house with the flamingos outside. It was us.
