Like Shopping?

This week's Long & Short Reviews question was whether reviewers like or dislike shopping. 

I don't dislike shopping but I like a lot of other things better. I never really was the sort of girl whose idea of an afternoon's entertainment was to hang out on the mall.

I'm more likely to enjoy necessary shopping when it can be done in aid of a good cause. I don't get high on the formaldehyde odor of "new," although I don't notice any positive symptoms after exposure, as Grandma Bonnie Peters used to do, and I don't think "new" things smell nasty, as she did. (GBP once quit a job when someone put in a new carpet.) I do like the way you never know exactly what you'll find at a charity store. 

Some of the things you find at charity stores are unused end-of-season stuff from department stores, still sealed in plastic. I don't like the idea of wearing other people's shoes or underwear, but I have found shiny new shoes and underwear in charity stores. Likewise shiny new toiletries. If you really need shoes, underwear, soap, a toothbrush, etc., Murphy's Law dictates that the day you got to the store would be the day they'd sold the ones you could use...so thriftshopping teaches us to buy things in advance of need and stockpile a bit. 

Still, how much I like shopping depends on how much more I like the other alternatives available.

Today, for example, would be a good day to go shopping.

Start with the Internet connection still being feeble so that, for example, instead of showing whatever the weather's doing at the weather station, the computer has been telling me it was 84 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy for the past six days. 

Add to that the way, in real life, the temperature even at the Cat Sanctuary has been above 84 degrees Fahrenheit before midday for most of those days.

Add to that the way, last night, after eating about a tablespoonful of pepitas that had been soaked in chicken broth so that she actually ate them with relish, Dora-kitten reacted like someone who has a serious problem with internal parasites. The seeds of plants in the cucurbit family are full of essential minerals that nourish large animals and kill any internal parasites they may have. For most of us this is not a problem. It's like getting Vitamin C shock from eating three oranges. You might or might not notice anything happening, and if you did it wouldn't be painful. When people who've been malnourished eat lots of Vitamin C they wail, and when people who've been carrying around a lot of internal parasites suddenly manage to kill several parasites at  once, they may feel uncomfortable too. 

So Dora rushed out of the office, but she didn't make it all the way to the sand pit. There was a horrible little puddle on the porch.

So then, while cleaning the porch, I rested my hand against some things I'd stacked up on the porch for storage, and something stung my finger. Something large, going by the feel--a European Hornet? I said, "Ouch," with great feeling, and then I said, "I beg your pardon, Friend Wasp," and turned the flashlight beam to see if she was still there. 

It was not a large wasp. It was a mob of horrible little things that looked like melanistic bees.

I went in and Googled them. Google said they were yellowjackets--one of a few very similar-looking, yet apparently distinct, species in the genus Vespula..

Say whaaat? I'm familiar with the large ground-nesting wasps that people I know call yellowjackets. They're not a great deal bigger than paper wasps, maybe 12mm instead of 9mm, but they make up for it in unlovableness. Paper wasps are generally peaceable animals who don't deserve their bad reputation; most of them will sting if they feel threatened, and some pack a load of venom, but their motive for approaching humans is usually to protect us from gnats or mosquitoes. Paper wasps aren't really very intelligent about solving problems, they just have awesome instincts, but they do have enough sense to recognize friends. They can be good friends to have. But the yellow wasps my friends and family know as yellowjackets just loll about in orchards, waiting for fruit to be damaged, and get drunk on fermenting fruit juice and pick fights with everybody. 

These little things had nothing in common with the yellowjackets I've always known except for their venom. The Pennsylvania science site said that, although they make themselves very unpleasant in Pennsylvania, the Vespulas earn their keep by eating nuisance insects. Considering that they're less than a quarter the size of our yellowjackets, their ability to deliver almost an equal amount of pain astonished me. Well, for one thing, at least three of them must have stung my finger at the same time to produce the sensation of having touched a large wasp. 

Google said I could try applying baking soda to the sting, or else vinegar, which suggested that neither treatment does much good. The pain, sources seemed to agree, would peak in about two hours; the swelling, in about two days. Ice, cold water, or elevating the hand might reduce the swelling. This was fine helpful information in a house without a refrigerator, I growled, and lay down to try elevating the injured hand. If I hadn't been stung I might have felt sleepy, it being four o'clock in the morning, but as things were lying down called my attention to what promised to be a very long list of things I could do without--prickly heat, and reactions to the poison in the air, and frustration with the way the feeble Internet connection refused to move from one Petfinder page to another...

...and the question of where these Vespulas, who are more black than yellow and are less logically entitled to the name "yellowjackets" than the animals I've always called that, had come from. It was not as if they were local animals that might have come to the porch during the night because their home had been flooded, or raided by a skunk. They're not local. If I'd ever seen anything that looked like really belligerent bees, growing up during the panic about the "killer" or "bravo" or "African" bees, I would have remembered. I never have. Insects migrate, but why would a ground-nesting species choose a crack in between stored objects that I move and the cats climb over every few days, when there's so much soft, well-drained soil to burrow into? 

I have a Professional Bad Neighbor who wants to motivate people to move away and sell land cheap. He's admitted this. He's been harassing people for years, getting away with stupid pranks because nobody believes a grown-up employed man would do them until they hear him admit it. His latest stupid prank of which I was aware was putting ants' eggs in people's mailboxes and mixing up their mail. The ants, which were a biting species, would hatch as the metal mailboxes warmed up in the morning sun, then die as the metal continued to warm in the afternoon sun. A lot of the Bad Neighbor's other pranks have involved cruelty to animals.

These things that people in other places call yellowjackets are not native to my part of the world. They are common, per Google, in Pennsylvania and other Eastern States. Had they been shipped on ice from the same place as the ants' eggs? 

The sun came up. I got up. I opted for a benign first strike, tucking a mothball into the crevice immediately above the Vespulas. Maybe making sure they were all dead would be the public-spirited thing, but I figured that if the Vespulas moved off the porch the skunk would probably like them. Google said skunks, and also raccoons, bears, moles, and shrews, enjoy Vespulas as much as they do our larger but lazier ground-nesting wasps. So: mothball. The Vespulas immediately started buzzing and flying about. Some of them flew in my direction. I went back inside. 

There are other things to do about wasps if you don't want to try making friends with them, which I figure is a lost cause with these Vespulas. Not spraying poison vapor into the air doesn't mean we can't squirt harmless things that kill on contact. Boiling water or steam kills a lot of things without doing a bit of harm to other things right beside them. Alcohol kills insects on contact, if you get enough coverage. Listerine, which I've used to clean some of those stored items in the past, also kills many small animals on contact. Water, alcohol, and the herbal oils in Listerine, are all natural substances that don't normally harm large animals. Liquid soap, mosquito repellent, and various cosmetics that are squirted out of non-aerosol bottles onto hair or skin...might release some chemical vapors into the air others have to breathe, so I'm not recommending them or saying I plan to use them. I'd rather just let the Vespulas go off somewhere where the skunk can enjoy them in peace.

I don't know whether Vespulas are intelligent enough to make friends with humans. Paper wasps, hornets, and mud-dauber wasps are. Bees are. What I've learned from living with those animals is that they bond with humans, or else they do not, on first meeting. When they buzz around you and make threat displays, like sitting on your arm and grooming their stingers, they're forming their judgment of what kind of animal you are. Remain calm, and they decide you're a peaceable animal that belongs in their territory, and become friends. They will protect you from nuisance insects. They may even protect you from in-laws or Jehovah's Witnesses, if they perceive that those things are disrupting the peace in their territory. 

Do they ever sting? Yes. It doesn't happen every year. The wasps in my part of the world have a lot to teach the humans about peace, as do the spiders. Once in two or three years I carelessly crush somebody, and the animal naturally enough lets me know what I've done while it struggles to save itself. Can it be blamed?  

I don't mind living with friendly wasps who have the ability to sting, any more than I mind living with cats who can scratch, dogs who can bite, or humans who can sue. (Many of the humans I know also carry firearms, but what you need to be mindful about is that they can sue.) The wasps have enough sense to know that I don't intend to provoke any unpleasantness, just as the cats, the dogs, and the humans do. 

Unfortunately my experience has been that, if your first encounter with a wasp goes wrong, it will not be a friendly wasp. I'm not willing to try making friends with the Vespulas. 

At this particular moment I'm giving them time to notice that the mothball is not going away, and find somewhere to go, before escalating to deadly force. I am trapped in the office, held hostage by a few dozen angry, dumb animals about the size of my little fingernail. The cats aren't pleased because it's past time for me to set out kibble and cold water for them. The air in the office is sweltering. The air outside is building up to another thunderstorm. The Internet is still...not running...not even seeping...more like dripping, drop by drop. 

This would be a good day to do some shopping, actually. If someone would drive up with a ladder I'd climb out the window and go to the mall.