over the last few days, I've felt increasingly like we've unwittingly bought a home that is a part of Jack Hanna's Wild Insect Kingdom, or on some unseen chasm of abnormal amounts of wierd looking bugs. We started with the multitudinous centipedes (that are getting so brave they're hanging out on my chairs upstairs!!) the various types and sizes of spiders and of course untold numbers of waterbugs that inhabit our house. Then there are the box elder beetles that have been growing all summer in our gardens, waiting to swarm as the weather gets cold, now there's something else.

For the last week, Seth and I both have been finding these little black beetles everywhere in the house. If it's not in the kitchen, it's on the wall in the hallway, in the bathroom, in bedrooms. They don't do anything, just crawl around, but I don't want them hanging out in my house! They're not fast, they don't run, they don't fly that I've seen, but they do make a great "POP" noise when you squish them, on account of their hard beetle shells.

I'd like to blame our bug problem on it being an old house, but my mom's house is close to 50 years older, and it doesn't have nearly this many bugs in it. It's not the climate, because I've lived here all my life and have never seen this many bugs in one house, not even when we lived on Blaisdell in the old rickety place. Maybe about as many centipedes, but not total number of bugs...so I guess my only real theory is that something in our house is attracting the bugs to come in. Either that or we're under attack on a very small scale. In about 50 years or so, the house will be totally overrun by all sorts of invertebral, exoskeletal life forms, and from there, who knows, maybe it'll be their base of operations from which to take over the world...