Bugs like to stalk me.

I’ll be sitting here at my computer desk, minding my own business, when something appears in the corner of my eye.  It’s moving slowly, back and forth, creeping ever closer to me. It’s green, it’s small, it has wings, 6 legs, two beady eyes, and holds its arms up close to its front. Preying Mantis.

They love me. Or something. They stalk me all the time, and always act so surprised when they finally catch me and I’m too big. They sit on my arm (or hand) and look at me, all confused. Why aren’t I a yummy fly? And then I stand up, take them back outside and send them on their way.

Well now there’s been a new development. Today I was out gardening (gotta get the yard looking good for those prospective buyers, ya know) and the preying mantises were staying well clear. (At this time of year, they’re too little, anyways.) But the crickets were stalking me!

I can understand this to a point, after all, I was ruining all their excellent hiding spaces. Perhaps they had a chat to the ants and together they arrived at a consensus that since they were bigger, the crickets would have a better chance of distracting me from my evil purpose. It worked, for a bit.  I thought one cricket had gone up my shorts and I spent a few panicky serious moments jumping  up and down and feeling around to see where it had gone. Turns out, it was in my shoe. Not much better, but hey, I’ll take it.

And then the others started to stalk me.  They’d hop out of the dead leaves I was moving around, then turn around and start hopping towards me! I couldn’t distract them for nothing. At one point, 4 of the little hoppers had me surrounded!

I know they were disappointed with the result, though. Having recovered from the thought of one of them in my shorts, I called the kids over to see all the crickets.  The children were duly impressed and of course, tried to catch them. (As you do.) That made the stalkers scurry!!

So I was left to my cricket habitat destruction, and to the ants, who were clearly disgusted by the crickets’ failure. And let me tell you, ant bites hurt. Even the bites from the itty bitty black ones.