I've recently moved house which in terms of time and energy and also financially is utterly exhausting. I'm finally at a point now where the process has calmed and I've been able to knead some normalcy back into my life. But for awhile there I was dealing with all the hassle of moving into a new house as well as what seemed to be low-budget versions of the plagues of Egypt.
Within a week or so of moving in, still living out of boxes and the like, my eyes drifted to my front window, where my dog was sitting on the windowsill, intently gazing out. What I saw outside was beyond the experience of my stunted man-child mind. Wasps. Every-single-where. There were a few idling, still figures on the outside, but for the most part it was a full tornado of buzzing chaos that had visited itself upon my morning. Incredulously I watched the postman go about his business, oblivious to the madness around him. That most popular of story archetypes, the Little Old Lady, strolled calmly through the bestingered, winged melee. Was I mad? Was this a crazed hallucination brought on by the stress of moving house? What in the name of holy Jordi Cruijff should I do about them?
Cloaked in my own cowardice, I crept through the back door, down the back garden path to the alley behind my house and circled, pajamed, to the opposite side of the street where I beheld their infernal construction.
I journeyed to my place of employ, downtrodden, downhearted… down. In my quarter century's worth of experience there was no solution to this problem. Arriving at work I flexed my under-exercised raconteurial muscles and regaled my colleagues with my tragic tale of hardship. Empathy, sympathy, kindness… these things I received verbally. And heard spoken the greatest advice ever received. Perhaps the best advice that will ever be received.
"The council will come and deal with that," she said.
Words truer than true! As I surfed on the great waves of modern digital communication I beached upon the Council's website. I logged my problem and by the time I returned home the wasps had dispersed. It is unclear as to whether the Council dealt with this issue or whether the wasps simply caught wind of my betrayal and dispersed accordingly. Regardless, I arrived home relieved and satisfied.
The next plague which visited me was the plague of one single leaf-cutting bee. You may well believe this to be stretching the definition of plague to its limits, but coming on the back of the wasp fiasco, I was ready to punch any buzzing creature with my fist until dead. The death of either me or the insect, I had no care for which. One bee would not usually stir this ire in me, but for the fact that I had noticed that the thing was building a nest in the wooden surround of my back garden, wheedling his black and yellow way into the underbelly of my fencing. I had visions of autumnal afternoons in the back garden spent supping serenely, visions of peaceful picnics prevented by a pack of prying pests, passers of tres, undoing my utopia!
He's gone now, though.
The third plague rode into town on the back of two kittens. It was rather a spur of the moment decision to welcome the two feline creeps into our home. The decision to add a kitten to our menagerie (prior population: 1 poodle) quickly doubled to two kittens as we decided not to split the last two brothers of a litter. Far be it for me to compromise my rampant masculinity with use of the word 'cute', but couched in such a hedged sentence as this I shall, and have. How timid they first seemed! They are now nosey, adventurous bastards.
When we went to pick them up (from a friend who'd already picked them up from their original home), we were met with an apology that these two silent babies "had fleas". A little frustrating, but these things happen. It took us mere minutes of the drive home to realise that "had fleas" was a wholly inadequate description of the situation. They were essentially flea food, perhaps merely the packaging that the fleas we'd bought were being dispatched on. They spent the majority of their first day with us scratching, the poor buggers. Luckily, within a day the flea treatment was working and the kittens had died off, leaving us with the 50 healthy fleas we had always dreamed about. HAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHA.
For the weeks since we've had them the kittens, Sirius and Lupin, have increased their abilities far beyond their meagre 'scratch ourselves' origins. They can now claw the curtains, bat the dog in the face, attack each other, scream for food and walk on keyboards; nearly a full house of 'adorable' cat techniques. Braving the plague of fleas has proven well worth the struggle; it has been nothing but shenanigans from them ever since.
