Metamorphosism

Attack of the very, very small spiders

1. The sunny sides of our house - south and, um, east were very seedy looking with hundreds of little black spider nests. After some debate it was decided that I would sweep them off with a broom with a long stick attached to the handle to make it longer, rather than squirt them off with a hose. It didn't take as long as I'd expected, nor was the slapstick as pronounced as I'd thought it would be, and the house looks presentable again with no spiders on it.

2. Sitting outside on a balmy evening at a nice wine tavern out in the country, orange sunset fading to etc etc, we were plagued both by waitresses bringing us plates of Grammelknödel* we had not ordered but they thought we had, so we ate them because they were so good (4 orders in all) and also several classes of stinging insects, including mosquitos, some sort of bee, and wasps. Taking a break from my Grammelknödel, I looked at our youngest daughter just in time to see a bee fly out of her right nostril. I asked her about this, and she said it had not flown out of her nostril, but flown *up* her nostril, and she had snorted it back out, and sort of batted it away from her face. It was a little yellow bee about the size of a honey bee. After being snorted out, it flew down the front of her dress, all the way down and out the bottom to freedom, she said. I tried to think of a joke tying this in with the Holy Ghost impregnating Mary by flying up her dress in the form of a dove but couldn't on the spur of the moment like that. Then I decided to check her dress just in case the bee was still in there. And guess what I found? No bee, but a stinger with the venom sac still attached, sticking from the knuckle of the middle finger on my right hand!!! And I knew exactly what to do!!!

   Luckily, the stinger was stuck into a rather insensitive area of my finger, where I happen to have thick skin due to the idiosyncratic way I hold pencils, pens etc. Still, venom was pumping in and it was beginning to sting a bit. But if you try to just pull it out, you squeeze the venom sac and inject all the poison. Instead, I took a knife from the table and, after showing everyone the cool stinger with poison sac still attached sticking out of my finger, scraped it off. Then I couldn't find the stinger anymore. Unfortunately, it was the same color as Grammeln so I didn't use that knife to cut the rest of my dinner, just the fork which was fine as the dumplings (Knödel means dumpling) were tender.

3. Yesterday, our youngest daughter rode her bike, more or less under her own control, for the first time. I've been trying to do the dad thing all summer and teach her to ride the bike. Like me, I told her, fear is your worst enemy. We worked on getting over the being scared part and moving into the having fun part. Yesterday, we figured she was ready for an audience after several weeks of brief test rides, and with her big sister watching she rode all the way across the parking lot. Then with her mother watching she rode several more times. Then we tried an empty street, and she did fine there too, although I did have to grab her fast once before she could run into a parked Mercedes.

   And last night while watching bats at her grandparents, she, only six, sang "Get Up, Stand Up" to me, with her own choreography (getting up, standing up). I was so proud.

*Grammeln are, mm, not sure exactly. Some lard-related product. Perhaps some byproduct of the lard refinery process. Crunchy crust-like bits of something, not exactly meat, more like crunchy fat, with a slightly peanutty aftertaste, I find.