Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Bugs

As before, there'd be a picture here if I wasn't on a 28.8 dialup -- ideally something like a close-up of a mosquito, its long needlenose sunk deep into a landscape of magnified skin. But alas, it is not to be, so back to the bugs.

The NMH network, for example, is full of 'em. I couldn't blog last night because the firewall was down with the virtual flu; computer bugs of all sorts clog our mailboxes and our wires, corrupting hard drives and stifling proper OS functioning. Public computers shut themselves off after fifteen minutes. Our servers groan and flicker. I guess that's what you get when 800 new computers suddenly plug into your network all-at-once to begin the incestuous gabfest that only a new school year can bring, but this year's been a thousand times worse than previous years, partially because the incidence of viruses running around the Internet right now is at a pretty steep peak -- it even made last week's Newsweek.

And then there's the fleas on the dog. We only noticed them yesterday, bathed 'em off quickly, but I still ended up with a bite or two somehow; the cat didn't seem to have any, but just thinking about fleas makes me itch with the phantoms of a thousand fevered fleadreams. And why is it every time we leave the dog with Virginia it gets fleas? So many theories on this one -- does she have fleas? Is she taking our dog to slum with the great unwashed of the canine kingdom? -- but perhaps we'll never know. (Sure, we could just ask, but where's the fun in that?)

Of course, the reason the house is full of bugs -- like that orange-beige moth currently shadowboxing over by the uglier of two black lamps -- is that the solution to the problem "how will the cat get out when we live on the third floor" has turned out to be a brick in the downstairs door, plus a slight ajar-ness to the apartment door at the top of the two wooden flights up; when the cat wants to come home, he just nudges the apartment door open, and all these flying critters -- moths, mosquitoes, more -- that have just been hanging out downstairs by the entryway light come seeping in like rain through a poorly plastered ceiling.

Oh wait, it wasn't a moth. It was a big-ass stick-like thing, body just a bit thicker than one of those huge female mosquotoes, or are those the males? I can never remember.

Tonight, my first night of post-dorm-residence dorm duty was even infested. Sure enough, the new boys seem like a calm and focused group this year, but, as is generally the case, over half are new; how should they know that propping all the outside doors open with wooden wedges and ping-pong paddles lets in summer's leftover mosquitoes, bred in the nearby pond, looking for a slightly warmer night and a hearty bedtime snack?

But man, was it good, almost centering, to drive away and come home at the end of a verylong day. I never realized, I guess, how living so close to the kids kept me just a little bit buggy without even realizing it. It sure is good to be me right now, no matter how fleabitten or ragged.