Invasion!

 

          “PEG!” Mike yells. “C’MERE!”

          I could tell from the tone of his voice that something was going on. I went as quickly as I could.

          I found Mike in the bedroom, pulling his britches on, and all looked normal to me. “What?” I asked confused.

          “What’s that?”

          I looked around. “What’s what?”

          “That,” and he pointed to the floor on the other side of the bed.

          There, big as day, was a Longhorn Beetle. If you’ve never seen one, you’d be impressed by their size. These guys can get up to two inches long. This one was about an inch and a half.

          I can’t find a lot of information about these guys, but I’ll tell you what I did find out.

          The Brown Prionid is a borer beetle. It lays its eggs in wood where the grub eats and makes tunnels and emerges as an adult. I don’t know how long they stay a larva or how long they live once they’re adults, but I’m guessing not long. I found one reference that says adults don’t eat, which means they breed and die.

          Gingerly, I picked him up and took him outside. I took his picture as he crawled on my hand.

          He fell and landed in the wet grass. I touched him and he squeaked! I was so surprised I pulled my hand back thinking, if he can make a noise, maybe he can bite. I braved-up and picked him up again. Now he’s got water droplets on his elytra, his wing case. Yes, they can fly.

          The Brown Pironid makes his squeaking noise by rubbing a hind leg against his elytra. They’re not known to bite but all bets are off if you man-handle one.

          These beetles are attracted to light and likely how they find their way into your house.

          A couple of nights later, I was laying there, sleeping, or in that land between awake and asleep, when I felt a tickle on my neck. You know the kind of tickle I mean. The light feathery kind of tickle only spider legs can bring. In a panic I brushed it off, got up on my elbow, and fumbled on the headboard for the flashlight I keep there. Since I’d been laying facing the center of the bed, this is where I looked for the interloper. When I don’t immediately see anything, I start exploring under pillows and covers. I don’t want a spider in my bed so I made an exhaustive search and when I couldn’t find anything, concluded that he was gone.

          It goes without saying that I had a hard time relaxing. I’m starting to doze off when I hear something scritchy-scratch on my pillow. In a panic for the second time this night, I’m up on an elbow reaching for the flashlight. I flicked it on just in time to see a moth flutter down between my two pillows. I picked up the edge of the pillow and was shocked to find a Brown Pironid Beetle!

          “It was probably the same one that got back inside after you turned him loose,” Mike says later.

          I gently cupped the beetle in my hands, made my way to the kitchen, turned on the porch light (checking to make sure there’s no bears out there first), opened the door and tossed the beetle into the night.

          I crawled back in bed, pulling the covers up tight, and think, that’s what I felt on my neck. Then I started to imagine what that beetle might feel like on my neck and wished I wouldn’t’ve. A bug that big and heavy wouldn’t leave such a little tickle behind, would he? I needed to get some sleep so I put the whole thing out of my mind and determine to go to sleep.

          I’m in my sleeping position, on my side, and just starting to drift off when I feel a little tickle right between my breasts! You know the kind of tickle I mean. The light feathery kind of tickle only spider legs can bring. I gave it a quick brush and jumped right out of bed. This time when I turned on the flashlight, I see a little spider heading for the cover of the covers. I picked up the blanket and he took off deeper under the blankets. The next time I picked up the blanket, I was prepared to brush him from the bed but he was a fast little bugger! I missed him two more times and he was near the foot of the bed before I managed to get him brushed to the floor.

          What a night! It was like an invasion! I’ve never, ever —no never! — had a night like that before!

          The next day, or maybe the day after, we were going someplace and Mike backed the car out of the garage to wait for me. Making my way through the garage I see another Longhorn dead in the track of the car. Mike ran him over. The same beetle? Two different beetles? Three? I’ll never know.

          While we’re talking about beetles, I found another Oriental Beetle this week. And like last time, I was in the car when I found him. These guys are in the same family with the green metallic Japanese beetles, but you don’t see them as much because they’re night-fliers and don’t have as much of an appetite as their cousins. 

          Oh gosh! With 142 pictures in my file this week, I don’t know where to start. I’m a little overwhelmed.

          “Peg! What do you always tell us?” you ask.

          I know, right! One bite at a time.

          Since I know you want to hear about Bondi, I’ll start there.

          I was hoping to have Bondi housebroken by now, but she isn’t. As long as I haul her outside every so often, she’ll do her business outside. She just hasn’t gotten it in her head that it’s not okay to pee (or poo) in the house — but we’re working on it.

          Bondi goes in her kennel throughout the day to nap and sometimes to play. Like this time. I don’t know what she was doing but I laughed when I looked over and saw she had her bed tipped up. I didn’t go to her rescue. I figured she’d get out of it on her own, and she did.

          Bondi is just the best little dog to sleep with if you like a snuggler. She’ll push her back up against my chest, forepaws on my arm and her head under my chin. She gives a big sigh and goes to sleep. She doesn’t sleep like that all night. It’s just for when we first go to bed or when it’s time to get up.

          I’ve discovered I don’t need an alarm to get me up to take her out in the middle of the night. She’ll come and get snuggly with me, which wakes me, but she can’t settle. That’s when I know she needs to go out.

          One night, in the middle of the night when I took her out, she backed up against the taller grass at the base of the Glads and pooped. “Good girl.” I always praise her when she does her business outside. In the morning, I go looking for her poo. Mostly, it’s to keep track of her health, but at some point, I’ll have to rake it up and get rid of it. Shock and surprise overcome me when I see a line of orange poo standing in the grass. I don’t think I gave her that many carrots yesterday, I think and investigate.

          Upon closer inspection, what I found was a Dog Stinkhorn Mushroom, and her poo was a little farther down and normal looking.

          This mushroom gets its name because it looks like a certain doggy part protruding from the ground, and just let me tell you, they do stink! The flies love it, though. It’s their job to distribute the spores. The Stinkhorn begins life as a tough-skinned “egg” or an oval structure usually not visible above the ground. It’s attached to the soil by a white cord. The egg structure splits open and the mushroom begins to grow rapidly. In five or six hours it can grow four to five inches tall and a half inch in diameter.

          It only lasted the one day. It fell over and by evening it was all but gone back into the earth. There are claims that this mushroom is even good for your soil.

          While these mushrooms are not edible, they’re not poisonous either.

          I’ve got a new phone and I don’t know how to work it very well. But I wanted to show you how Bondi snuggles so I took a few early morning selfies. 

          Bondi helps when it comes time to take the laundry off the clothesline. 

          She’ll eat her food when there’s a little competition for it. If she had the dish all to herself, she wouldn’t eat it.

          Bondi likes this little spring toy that my niece Rachel gave me a few years ago. Her dogs wouldn’t play with it and she thought Itsy or Ginger would. They didn’t either, but I held on to it. Now I know why. 

          We had some big winds blow through. I was in the yard with Bondi when a leaf landed not far from her. She ran, snatched the leaf up, and headed for the patio.

          Bondi likes the patio and will stay out even when I come inside. I get up and check on her from time to time. Often times she can be found chewing on a leaf or a rock or a stick.

          “I buy you toys and you chew on this stuff!” I scold.

She just looks at me.

          And I let her have them anyway. 

          I talked to my Miss Rosie the morning after the big wind.

          “Tux started barking around 11 last night,” Miss Rosie tells me a story. “Lamar took him downstairs and didn’t see anything, but he heard a voice like someone was on a phone. We had some branches come down, I wonder if a tree didn’t come down in the road and someone was calling for help. Then this morning, all morning long, the cars have been slowing down, like they’re looking at something.”

          I was curious. “I’ll get Mike. We’ll go down on the golf cart and check it out.”

          “Okay. We’re getting ready to go for our morning walk. We’ll stop at your house on our way back and compare notes.”

          Mike pulled on his shoes and out we go. The first thing we see is one of our Bradford Pears lost a branch. “We’ll get it on the way back,” Mike says.

          On the curve, just this side of the Kipps’ house, a Jeep is in the ditch. The monsoon-type rains we’ve been having have made all of the roadside ditches into deep abysses.

          “Is that Kimmy’s Jeep?” I asked after our neighbor.

          “I don’t think so. It’s the wrong color red,” Mike said.

          I see something is hanging underneath so I get off the cart to take pictures.

          “What is that?” I wanted to know.

          “Front drive shaft, maybe. A strut? I guess I don’t know,” Mike answered.

          “Do you think he was drunk?”

          “I don’t know.”

          Of course Mike doesn’t know. All we can do is guess.

          “That’s probably why they didn’t call the cops or a tow truck.”

          Coming back in our driveway, we stop and hook a strap to the downed branch. Bondi watched intently as we hauled it around to the burn pile.

           Bondi has a favorite place she likes to ride. She’s discovered the rag that lives behind the seat is nice and warm from the engine heat.

          I’m trusting. Sometimes too much so. I trusted Bondi to stay there. She didn’t. She climbed out onto the back when we stopped to get the mail and when Mike took off, she took a tumble down onto the road.

          She yipped.

          I looked. She wasn’t in her spot. I was scared we’d run her over. “STOP! STOP!” I yell in a panic.

          Mike slammed on the brakes and I saw Bondi, getting up off the road, giving herself a shake, and trotting after the golf cart.

“Bondi fell off!” I said.

Mike jumped off the cart, ran back and picked her up. Her backside was a little tender from the shot the vet had given her that morning, so I couldn’t tell if her little whine was from that or if she’d gotten hurt. Not to keep you in suspense, she was fine. Later in the day she was running and jumping like nothing had happened at all.

 Mike wanted to see them pull that Jeep out so he went down a couple of times but no one was down there.

 “I’d like to see it, too,” I said, “but I’m not going to keep running down there all day. Let’s ask Rosie and Lamar to call us when they see the tow truck come in,” I suggested and called them.

“I will,” Lamar said, “if I see it.”

That freed up one worry for the day. The worry that we’d miss it.

Tiger brought a frog into the fenced back yard.

Bondi was very interested in the frog and as soon as she could get it away from Tiger, she took it and ran up onto the patio.

“Let it go!” I told her and she did.

I carried Froggie back to the pond and turned him loose.

Then the call came.

          “Tux started barking and I hear voices coming from down there,” Miss Rosie said.

          Mike and I got on the cart and went to look.

          There were two young men there when we got there.

          “I was coming across the bridge and it was foggy,” the barely-out-of-his-teen-years driver said. “I put it in the ditch. I called my friend here and we decided to wait until this morning to try and get it out.”

          Through the course of the conversation, I found out it’s his dad’s Jeep. “Does he know?” I asked.

          The kid grinned and shook his head.

          As a parent, I would be more relieved that my kid wasn’t hurt than anything else. “Things can be fixed,” I heard the trite but true saying come out of my mouth.

          “We called another friend with a truck and trailer,” Chris said.

          His other friend turned out to be one of our other neighbors from on down the road. One of the Walker boys.

          When Caleb showed up, Chris climbed in his dad’s Jeep, gunned the engine, and in reverse, almost got the Jeep out of the ditch.

Caleb backed his truck up and started hooking a chain to the front of the Jeep.

“With that drive shaft hanging down like that, I think I’d pull it from the back,” I said to Dakota who came back to stand near us.

“I know. That’s what I told them, too. But this is how they wanna do it…” He let it trail off and shrugged.

I grimaced when the awful sounds of that drive shaft or whatever that thing was, bent backwards and gouged the road.

In the end, they caused so much more damage than there originally was, and they ended up having to call for a tow truck anyway.

We didn’t hang around so this is the end of the story as far as I know it.         

          Meadowsweet is blooming.

          And so is Pokeweed.

          I’ve got three colors of Glads blooming. Yellow, which bloomed first, then the red and now the pink. I love the Glads, but I don’t love digging up the bulbs in the fall and replanting in the spring.  

I saw one of these awesome looking Spined Micrathena spiders. They’re also called Castleback Orbweaver. See his spinnerets? 

I have so much more to tell you! Poking around in an old barn. Addi coming to do crafts with me. A trip to another fair.

So many more pictures to show you! More things I've made, more bugs, more flowers, and more beautiful faces.

But my time is short. I’ll give you this much for now and hope time permits me to tell you about the rest of my week.

          In the meantime, know that you’re in my heart.

          Let’s call this one done!