#A-TO-Z-CHALLENGE – LETTER “B” AS IN “BUG” OR “BEETLE”

Letter “B” as in “Bug” or “Beetle”; more precisely, “Ladybug”, or “Ladybeetle” as, my oldest and dearest friend, Pamela calls them. I'm writing about them, because, like the kittens, and the dog and birds, they have become part of my landscape and in a big way.

courtesy: familyman.com   

My hubby also had a bunch of the little devils visit him in his woodworking shed as well.

One day, last October, here in the foothills of the uplands in the Carolinas, in the countryside where we live, ladybugs took to swarming; something I'd never experienced before. I'd seen scads of lightning bugs as a kid in Michigan and later on, when I lived near Gastonia, NC and, had heard tell of swarms of crickets from my aunt when they first moved to Las Vegas some fifty-plus years ago, when her husband, my uncle Stan, worked at the nuclear test site out near there. I'd also experienced swarms of Mayflies from Lake St. Clair, in Michigan, in June.

courtesy: mdc.mo.gov  

Lightning bug swarms are prettier than Mayfly swarms; here's a batch of lightning bugs in Missouri.

The Mayflies came up out of the bottom and swarm all over the towns of Grosse Pointe and East Pointe. People were sweeping them up with their push brooms and they would crunch when you run over them with your car. Kind of icky, but they disappeared fast, as the birds and I think squirrels would get some new snacks.

We also had the love-bugs in Florida. Boy, did we have love-bugs. Something out of a laboratory that got loose. Two bugs hooked together that flew around for a few weeks. They just got mooshed under your windshield wipers and were a mess to clean up. I was never really sure where they came from, or what ecological niche they were supposed to fill, but they were annoying.

courtesy: tcpalm.com  

Love bugs are supposedly a science experiment that got loose and have no known predator, so they just show up and annoy Floridians twice a year. The story may be apocryphal, but I was too busy cleaning dead love bugs off my car to care.

But, the ladybugs I found rather charming. They apparently live for between 2 and 3 years and they swarm in late October in the upper-third of the United States, looking for places to hibernate. They found refuge outside in my eaves, but several hundred, or thousand – I wasn't taking names at the door – found respite in my ceiling and my kitchen and bedroom and music room. They tucked themselves in and went to sleep. They will live off their body fat for the winter. The amusing thing is that it doesn't get really, really cold here, so we'd have a warm day, and a few hardy souls would come buzzing out and I'd find them creeping around in the kitchen.

I'm sure a few have fallen victim to the kittens and one did fall into one of my frying pans when I was cooking. I was unhappy about that. I've talked to people who work in construction and they're used to coming up on packs of them in walls and things like that, so it's not unusual, but I like having them here. At least they beat the wasp infestation I had last summer. That was just annoying. At any rate, I had to remember that terrible children's rhyme, “ladybug, ladybug, fly away home! Your house is on fire, and your children are all gone!” If I'm remembering that correctly, that's just the stuff of nightmares. No wonder we're all in therapy!

I hope you all are having a wonderful #a-to-z-challenge! Next up, letter “C”!

#A-TO-Z-CHALLENGE 2020 – LETTER “A” ALLIE

Letter “A” is for “Allie”. Short for Allie Cat; a tuxedo rescue, we acquired at two months. My kitten Allie, aka “Kitten McGrabbyPaws” is something else. She's going to be one year old on the 29^th of this month, and she's not the tiny kitten she was when we first brought her home, but she's the squirmiest, grabbiest kitten I've ever had. She's really the sweetest thing on earth, but not the brightest cat around. But that's okay. She knows what she needs to know to be a cat. She does try to be a person, on occasion however and this is when she's at her funniest.

Here is Allie being a ham, telling me I'm doing it wrong. Check out the fur on her hind feet. All the kittens have this fur, which we have dubbed the "tragedy of cat wool" for some idiotic reason.

It's generally when I'm trying to fold clothes, or walking across the floor. When I'm folding clothes, she'll stand up on her hind legs and try to grab at the clothes. She mirrors my actions and it looks hysterical. I really need to get my fiancé to film this, because it does look so ridiculous. She waves those little paws around like they're little hands. She also tries to “hold” my hand when we're walking side-by-side and she'll try to get up on her hind legs. With very little success, I might add.

I fail to see how anyone could be comfortable sleeping in this position, but she does this on the regular. Help. My cat is broken.

All in all, she's a happy creature and she's not that demanding for a cat. We have a hard time finding treats that she'll like. The others will pile into whatever fishy, stinky thing we find for them, but not Allie. She does try to bury her food, though. I thought this was odd, until I looked it up and some cats do have this atavistic trait of trying to bury their food; it's left over from before their domestication, when they had to kill to eat and they would cover the part of the kill they didn't eat for a snack later. Our cats all have their quirks and I'll be telling you about some of the secret things I've found out about cats as we go through our #a-to-z-challenge! I hope everyone is having fun and staying safe!

She has the most bewitching eyes and she looks right at you! <3

#IWSG APRIL 2020 CHECK IN – LOST IN TRANSLATION

Several years ago, when I was homeless in Tampa, I mentioned in a post that things got lost in translation. Sadly, I cannot find that post and it was probably horrible. My brain has not unscrambled itself one whit and I still occasionally get things wrong. Hell, more than occasionally; more like three or four times a day. It's been this way since I was young, from an ER nurse asking me if I had a “religious preference” and me hearing, did I have a “relative present” and pointing to my then-husband. They both looked confused.

This current story isn't really about that, but more about how we can just turn a sentence into a form of Mad Libs when one person, probably out of frustration, or just to add to the pile of nonsense comes up with something truly silly. This happened recently in an MMORPG that I've been playing for the last fourteen years. This in and of itself is a tale, since most MMORPGs don't last this long, with the exception of Maple Story, WOW and a few others. We also have a clan that is fifteen years old, with the SAME people in it that founded the thing, for the most part. That in itself is a tale. At fourteen years in, I'm a johnny-come-lately. But, I digress.

These are one of the Elite Dungeons where I practice my craft. I earn lots of money doing this. Like most MMORPGs, Runescape3 is grindy, but the community is awesome. My co-Leader, SpZ Wolf, started in the Clan, the same day I did and we're partners in crime. 

For those readers who haven't put up with my ravings, I should explain that at best, I feel like I have a tenuous grasp of reality at the best of times. I'm perpetually in a state of out-of-itness and even when I think I just get a hold of whatever the current train of the state of affairs may be, it slips away from me. It's been like this all of my life and I'm not sure if it's due to what they used to call Asperger and now call something else, but was called “doesn't play well with others” when I was growing up and is truly apt in my case, or if I'm just dim. That being said, I've soldiered on, having some fairly successful careers in both music and in computers, so there's that. I still can't tell with all the lying going on in the media and up and down the political spectrum these days. Again, I digress, and I want to keep this light.

This is another dungeon, of Ascension Members. They are taken down with crossbows, which I double-wield. Every foe has a different strength and handicap. The depth and breadth of the game has grown over the years. We just added a new skill, Archaeology, so we're all starting from scratch on that and it's fun. 

At any rate, the MMORPG that I have played for what seems like eons is called “Runescape” and many of my clan mates have played as long as I have or longer. We've all been together for the fourteen to fifteen year range and have a solid cadre of about fifty people, although our site lists us with 163 members. The game itself lists over 250,000,000 accounts and I am ranked in the top 100,000, with my Slaying skill being at number 8,281 out of that 250,000,000, as I'm trying to get 200 million xp total. The skill is fun. The game itself is about 80% combat, with about 20% for skilling and questing. The skills are also tied into combat; you need to be able to mine and smith the best of ores to make combat armor that is durable enough for you to fight high-level bosses.

It's pretty much like any other grind-and-reward game. What makes it are the people and the community involvement and they're a hoot. People from around the world play the game, and we have them in my clan. We also have perma-guests in our clan chat.

One of them is a published author, from Barbados, unlike me, who just seems to dabble in writing and never finishes editing anything, although I have scads of ideas that sound great and then I see a shiny, or a symphony starts a season and I MUST go play. LintsJenesis is his game name and we were in our usual pattern of throwing badinage, banter and jesting back and forth, while skilling after a ddos had hit our login servers last week, and had kept us off of the game. For those who haven't experienced a “ddos” or a dedicated-denial-of-service attack on a login server, it's basically two asshats on two PCs who use scripted commands or macros to continually request logins directed at certain targets. Jagex and their servers have been targeted for ages and they are usually the precursor to attacks that then cascade west-ward, as the traffic backs up (Jagex servers are in the U.K. For the most part). The most spectacular of these brought down a good portion of the eastern U. S. banking; ATM's and gas stations were particularly hard-hit back in 2016 or so.

The rise of the pandemic has also seen the rise of the ddos-bots, and the bad old days are here once again. As usual, I digress.

As Lints and I were bantering about this, I mentioned that I got some laundry done and mopped some floors, because, “the floors wouldn't mop themselves” and the “clothes wouldn't launder themselves”. I must've been babbling, as per usual, and after several iterations of different ways the floors and clothing would get clean, Lints comes back with this gem:

I'm sure Lints had heard enough of my yammering when he came up with this gem.

I died laughing. Said I was going to use this and would give him credit. I also plan on featuring his books on my blog and doing a tour for him. He's an outstanding person and a good friend. I meet some of the best people online! Hope your #IWSG is fantastic! I also hope you all are enjoying #a-to-z-challenge! See you there soon!