icky - poo!
i am fortunate enough that on mondays i get to read to jackson's class immediately before their rest time. he is in kindergarten and he appears to still enjoy having me around him while his friends are present. there is no adequate formula for predicting the duration of this temporary phenomenon, so i will just enjoy it while it lasts.
last week i read a couple of books about spiders. to be accurate, one was about all manner of arachnids; but, the other was one of my earliest remembered stories from my childhood - "be nice to spiders." if you've never read it - check it out. it's an easy reader in the children's section. the gist of the story should be abundantly obvious.
one of the women i work with is horribly frightened of spiders. the smallest, most innocuous spider will send her into the kind of non-sensical pandemonium that i normally reserve for air travel. she hurriedly leaves the room, yells for me to "get over here, quick", and won't return until the offender is disposed of and guaranteed to have been quite alone. spiders don't frighten me, and i get to be the nice guy. i hope karen doesn't mind that i release the spider into the "wild" instead of killing it, as i believe she would prefer.
back to jackson's class. in preparation for reading time, jackson and uncle neil caught a spider in the yard. it was certainly big enough to send karen into a full-bore conniption. they also included a few grasshoppers to keep the spider well fed. the kids enjoyed the stories well enough; but they really dug the spider, especially since he was eating one of the grasshoppers at the time he was in the classroom.
this week, the class is studying worms. his assignment tonight was to dig up some worms and bring a couple of them to school. we dug and dug, but couldn't find a thing. thank goodness for wal-mart. it seems so weird, as we always find worms in our dirt when planting flowers or seeds. i wonder what happened to them. maybe they went south for the winter.
i have not always been so courageous with bugs and slugs. to tell the truth, they gross me out most of the time. things changed, though, as they always do. i remember a boy scout camp i went to several years ago. nelson riley (an entomologist friend of mine) taught a class on bugs. since he knew what he was doing, he could find more bugs in a ten-foot radius than i would locate in a whole afternoon of searching. he found almost 2 dozen kinds of bugs that day, and let each of them crawl all over his hands and arms - well, the scorpion was afforded less freedom. after teaching us about each species, he was very careful to return the little critter back to the place it was found - with as little molestation as possible. that day he taught me that a bug may look gross to some, but it will generally be harmless to humans, and will probably do some useful thing to enhance the environment in which i reside. i'll take his word for it.
a bug is not usually a big deal. charlotte doesn't want them in the house, but neither does she want them killed. i think this dogma is invalid when applied to wasps, scorpions, and roaches. other than these, we say "live and let live." now, about those fire ants.
bonus section:
if you have a fly buzzing around and causing annoyance, give me a call. i can catch him with my hand 9 times out of 10. they are cool to watch if you first shake him up in your hand like dice, and then throw him on the ground. if he survives the impact, he'll fly around "drunk" for a little while.
last week i read a couple of books about spiders. to be accurate, one was about all manner of arachnids; but, the other was one of my earliest remembered stories from my childhood - "be nice to spiders." if you've never read it - check it out. it's an easy reader in the children's section. the gist of the story should be abundantly obvious.
one of the women i work with is horribly frightened of spiders. the smallest, most innocuous spider will send her into the kind of non-sensical pandemonium that i normally reserve for air travel. she hurriedly leaves the room, yells for me to "get over here, quick", and won't return until the offender is disposed of and guaranteed to have been quite alone. spiders don't frighten me, and i get to be the nice guy. i hope karen doesn't mind that i release the spider into the "wild" instead of killing it, as i believe she would prefer.
back to jackson's class. in preparation for reading time, jackson and uncle neil caught a spider in the yard. it was certainly big enough to send karen into a full-bore conniption. they also included a few grasshoppers to keep the spider well fed. the kids enjoyed the stories well enough; but they really dug the spider, especially since he was eating one of the grasshoppers at the time he was in the classroom.
this week, the class is studying worms. his assignment tonight was to dig up some worms and bring a couple of them to school. we dug and dug, but couldn't find a thing. thank goodness for wal-mart. it seems so weird, as we always find worms in our dirt when planting flowers or seeds. i wonder what happened to them. maybe they went south for the winter.
i have not always been so courageous with bugs and slugs. to tell the truth, they gross me out most of the time. things changed, though, as they always do. i remember a boy scout camp i went to several years ago. nelson riley (an entomologist friend of mine) taught a class on bugs. since he knew what he was doing, he could find more bugs in a ten-foot radius than i would locate in a whole afternoon of searching. he found almost 2 dozen kinds of bugs that day, and let each of them crawl all over his hands and arms - well, the scorpion was afforded less freedom. after teaching us about each species, he was very careful to return the little critter back to the place it was found - with as little molestation as possible. that day he taught me that a bug may look gross to some, but it will generally be harmless to humans, and will probably do some useful thing to enhance the environment in which i reside. i'll take his word for it.
a bug is not usually a big deal. charlotte doesn't want them in the house, but neither does she want them killed. i think this dogma is invalid when applied to wasps, scorpions, and roaches. other than these, we say "live and let live." now, about those fire ants.
bonus section:
if you have a fly buzzing around and causing annoyance, give me a call. i can catch him with my hand 9 times out of 10. they are cool to watch if you first shake him up in your hand like dice, and then throw him on the ground. if he survives the impact, he'll fly around "drunk" for a little while.
posted by cm at 11/07/2005
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