May I whine?

I have a good life, so when I whine, it ends up being about trivial matters. Soybean harvest has begun, and because it's a warm, sunny day, the Asian Lady Beetles have returned. You can't open a door without some of them getting inside. They're capable of biting, and if you smash them, they emit an unpleasant odor. I hung three loads of laundry on the clothesline, and had to shake bugs off every piece of clothing I took off the line. Ick. I just brushed one off my belly that somehow got under my shirt. HELP!

Don't confuse these nasty things with our harmless native ladybugs.

My other petty gripe? I've missed the last two episodes of Cold Case, due to other shows running overtime. I've tried to make allowance by setting my DVR to record the shows that follow Cold Case, but so far I haven't succeeded; I'm not sure why.

May I always be so blessed that I have nothing worse to gripe about than bugs and TV shows.

Why doesn't CBS run full-length episodes of Cold Case online? Most of my other shows can be found online, if I miss them.

Escaping from the Asian Lady Beetles

It happens every year: Once the farmers have harvested all the soybeans in the fields, the bugs who lived in those fields start looking for a warm place to spend the winter. Those spots on the outside of my window? Multicolored Asian Lady Beetles. They are not the ladybugs I used to read about in Mother Goose (fly away home); these pests were imported by our government to help control aphids.

Have a closer look. For a really close look, click on the picture. If you smash these little creatures, they have an unpleasant odor; they've been known to bite, too.

They look for cracks and crevices around windows and doors where they can sneak inside. They want to live with me! At the old house, many of them did get in, and in spring it seems I spent half my time vacuuming up ladybugs. We'll see how many of them make it inside this trailer house. It's much better insulated, with no drafts at all. So far the only ones I've seen inside sneaked in when we opened the door. By the way, there's no extermination method for them, which you'll see if you go to this USDA site and scroll down to "prevention and control".

Anyhow, I needed to get away from the lady beetles for awhile, so Sadie and I went to the cabin. The bugs don't like shade, so there are very few of them in the woods. I started a fire and read from a book called "Poems For A Good and Simple Life". With no distractions, I could ponder the meaning of each line.



We stayed for a couple of hours before the evening chill got the best of us.


Amazing how something written in the 1600's can apply so well to today.


I love this. So short, so simple, so true.