Holiday bugs.

My husband says that I'm the one who always finds bugs in and around the house because I'm the only one looking for them.

Well, that could be true... but if there was a scorpion or a beetle on either my husband's computer or the TV remote, then he'd be finding them also.

Thanksgiving morning.... and everything in the dining room was looking just beautiful... I was admiring the decorations and place settings on the table and my eye happened to catch a teeny bit of movement in the curtains hanging in the archway between the dining room and the living room. I have two long panels of sheer silk and brocade curtains in that archway, one on either side of the wide arch. They serve no other purpose other than to dress up a square open space between the two rooms and the design of the soft fabric looks very Victorian.

What did not look very Victorian was the big scorpion that had found its way in-between the sheer silk and the brocade silk.  I usually capture scorpions with the vacuum cleaner, but with those delicate curtains, that wasn't going to work.  I got the dust-buster thing and slowly got the nozzle of it between the two layers of fabric......... and into the dust-buster went the scorpion.  That stupid thing must have been half asleep because it didn't start running until it was whirling around in the canister of the dust-buster. If Black and Decker were to use this scorpion-capture method in their advertising, they'd be selling dust-busters all over the state of Texas. One thing you have to remember after the scorpion is sucked up into that canister--- you have to spray a bit of Raid into the nozzle to get the scorpion gasping for its last buggy breath.

The other bug is a polka-dotted beetle of some sort that is right now somewhere in the live Christmas tree that's sitting in the corner of our dining room. We bought the tree this morning at Home Depot... lovely Frazier Fir, perfectly shaped from the bottom branches to the very top that's nearly touching the ceiling. My husband was securing the tree into the stand while I was holding onto the trunk of the tree to keep it steady... and that's when I saw the beetle, crawling on my wrist.

Of course I screamed a little first, just out of surprise, then I flicked my hand to get it off of my wrist, and into the tree it went..... this slow-moving polka-dotted square-shaped, flat little bug. I don't know if it's in the beetle family or not, but whatever it is, it's still in the tree. I thought of spraying the Christmas tree with Raid, but who knows if that would hurt the tree that we just paid $70 for. Better to let the bug find a comfy branch of the tree and settle in.... and I'm hoping that it doesn't find its way onto the dining room table during the next Waldorf Wednesday tea party.

Bugs. Insects. Crawling, creepy little things. The entire state of Texas was built on an enormous ant hill and is and forever will be protected by mega-armies of six- and eight-legged soldiers.