October 22, 2010

  • Hornets! Hornets!

    Or wasps. 

    I'd like to mark this as the day that I got stung by a wasp.  It was terrifying.  A perfect storm of events led up to it, including my Clint Eastwood Halloween costume.  I guess you have to pay a price to look cool.

    I had to order loads of different accessories from a few different places (including shipping the poncho from England because all US vendors were out).  One of the most important items was the hat, and I ordered one from eBay.

    So, FedEx delivered my hat yesterday, but I was gone.  So I left a note that was like, "just leave it on the patio".  It's behind some bushes and whatnot, so I figured no suckers would steal my valuables.

    So I get home, see it out there and think, "Yay!"  So I go out to get it, and I bring it inside.  All of a sudden I hear a buzzing and feel something crawling on my skin.  I go mental and start flailing around.  Apparently some beast (or beasts) had snuck in with me. 

    All of a sudden, I feel it.  STING! Right on my neck in the throatish area.  I let out a scream. The rest if sort of a blur.  I rip my shirt off and start looking around and see that there's just one wasp and he's flying around in the air.  I give him a good whack with my shirt and he hits the carpet.  Whack! Whack again! He's still conscious!  But dazed enough for me to go get some ammo. 

    So I run and get some Raid and douse him.  He doesn't like it and can't fly anymore.  Then I throw him in the toilet and send him to a watery demise. 

    The sting hurt pretty bad.  I was scared that I'd die like Macaulay Culkin in My Girl (spoiler alert).  Within a few minutes, I realized I probably wasn't allergic and should survive.  And I did.  But not without this wound.

    It got pretty red and stingy.  But the circle is sort of aesthetically pleasing. 

    The wasp was a brown bastard like this:

    I've already had a fear of wasp from when I was around 4 and my stepdad used to like to torture me.  A harmless dirt dobber had gotten in the trailer, and my stepdad told me it was a wasp and kept running from room to room locking me with it.  Then he pretended that he was stung in the eyes and blinded.  He told me to get the broom and take care of the wasp, and that it was "up to me."  It's situations like that that looking back, might have made mental. 

    But 20+ years later, fate played this cruel trick on me.  It was hard to swallow for a while.  Maybe that's the sting itself or the sting being on my throat.  I bought a videogame to cheer myself up. This is my life.