The Female of the Species is More Deadly than the Male

I'm not a big bug fan... insects, arachnids, whatever. Not my cup of tea. If you want to see me jump into helpless-female-stereotype behavior, just watch me send my husband off spider hunting as I huddle on the sofa, eagerly awaiting news of its demise.

Above all I hate - not just dislike, HATE - wasps.

So there's a busy yellowjacket nest hanging in the eave above my bedroom window. Mr. Geeky McEngineer destroyed the nest the last nasty little monsters built outside the kids' bedroom window. With that threat abolished, we got a little lax about the new nest.

They may not know it yet (but I wouldn't put it past them to have read my mind and formed a plan to gird their skinny waspy abdomens for battle), but their lives end tonight. Why, you might wonder (or not) am I suddenly all motivated? Why is this nest MINE?

Because apparently there is a hole in the screen of my bedroom window. I wouldn't have noticed it, but when I was putting laundry away, this morning, a waspy intruder was busy exploring my baby's basinette, leaving who-knows-what kind of nasty pheremone trail in her wake.

Game on.

Note to all bugs in or around my house: you may think I'm a wimpy pushover, but that's only because you haven't crossed the line yet. You know you have not crossed it because you and your little buggy family still live. As long as you keep yourself out of the way when Mr. G and his shoe-of-death are on call, you're golden. But the second you set one sticky, buggy little appendage on my kids' sleeping surface, your life is forfeit. You meet the Ms. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll. I promise the introduction will be brief but thorough.

Don't believe me? Ask the dismembered, smushed up wasp now residing in my HEPA filtered vacuum bag.

Or, if that doesn't convince you, witness the annihalation of a whole wasp colony and the nest of corpses it leaves behind.

And stay off the basinette. Got it?

(Edited to add: Title references poem by Rudyard Kipling.)

I'm so bad!

So tonight, as I was singing bedtime songs to G-Rex, she showed me a little cup of beads she had accumulated and told me that she had drawn out three in a row - all red!

I couldn't resist.

I told her, "You know, if you take that cup downstairs and say, 'Daddy, will you teach me about probability and statistics?' I bet you'll get to stay up for an extra hour!" I made her practice saying "probability and statistics."

Sure enough.

Mr. Geeky McEngineer had to get all involved in a lesson... but managed to pull away so he could play StarCraft with his brother. G-Rex is still up. And probably will be for a few more hours, playing with her cup of beads, surrepticiously watching the Olympics.

Memory Game--I Wanna Play Too!!!

Here's how it works:

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you know me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I'll assume you're playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one about you. If you don't want to play on your blog, or if you don't have a blog, I'll leave my memory of you in my comments.

**By the way, it will be very sad if no one plays along...

Keen WUH???

Tonight's dinner was a new culinary adventure for us. I made quinoa.

I highly recommend it, and after reading about the nutrition profile, even Mr. Geeky McEngineer thinks it's worth adopting as one of the dietary staples. Good stuff.

And for those who care, it's a complete protein grain (well, technically it's a seed, not a grain) with no gluten. Thought I'd share.

I was proud of my kids. Brand new food. They never so much as batted an eyelash or squinted in skepticism - just dug in and offered fabulous critique on the finer points of comparison between the quinoa and more usual fare (wild rice, brown rice, barley, polenta, et al.).

Good times at the McEngineer dinner table.

Slow Start

OK,

The last few days have been huge, for me, in the realm of personal growth and actualization, but I'm not ready to sit down and tell everyone all about it. Too much processing left to do, you see.

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: Kids are people, and actually MEMBERS of SOCIETY!!! :o)

--(Required reading for discussion!)--

A Tip of the Hat to Paris

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

So I know many of you have already seen this (or portions of it), but I've been meaning to embed it here, too. I've never been a huge fan of Ms. Hilton, but I have to at least give her a little love for participating in this project.