Murderin' Wasps

Notice: The following story is fictional, any resemblance to former wives or their lawyers, married or divorced is strictly coincidental.

I had to climb up on my roof today to make an assessment of a soft place in one of the eave lines. In the process, I discovered three large wasps nests.

Being as one of the nests was right above the place where my wife parks her car, I decided I should take care of the situation pronto in order to avoid a messy divorce when she got stung due to my negligence.

I could imagine her lawyer pointing her trembling trigger finger at me and saying, "Your Honor, this...this...man is the cause of my client's decline in health. His criminal negligence in allowing a wasp's nest to be built right over her parking space resulted in extreme pain and mental anguish for her. We ask that she be awarded all the property except his 14 foot Lone Star fishing boat and 1985 Dodge truck. We ask that you order him to pay her $5000 dollars for the outfit." And banging his gavel the judge says, "It is so ordered, next case"

With this vision in mind I hurried down to the Home Depot and bought the biggest, baddest looking can of RAID wasp spray I could find. The can was black, which is fitting for a weapon of mass destruction, I guess. Anyway, I wanted the best, a man don't take chances when he's protecting the thing he loves, his half of the community property.

I waited until my wife got home so she could see what a big brave husband she had. Yeah, Waspkiller! That's me!

I couldn't get the spray button to work so my wife read the directions on the side of the can and removed the safety pin from under the spray button. Of course, I did this on purpose to make her feel smart.

Then I advanced on the first objective. Approaching to a distance of seven feet I let fly with the concentrated stream of insecticide. All the wasps that had been milling around on the nest immediately dropped to the ground, dead as mackerals. I soaked the nest to kill the larvae.

It reminded me of when I use to kill wasps in my grandma's chicken house with a mason jar half full of red gasoline. The trick was to pitch the gasoline at a point far enough away so that by the time it reached the nest it has spread out enough to drench all the wasps on the nest. Gasoline was instant death for wasps, they would drop straight to the ground, dead. If you missed, or was too far away, or too close, you had to run like hell to keep from being stung by semi-conscious but very angry insects.

Anyway, the second nest went as easily as the first. But on the third nest the juice ran out almost as soon as I had started to spray. This left me with a bunch of pissed off wasps coming at me with the intent of putting their stingers into my flesh until they got tired of it.

I ran as fast as an old man can run, which ain't very damn fast, to the first door on my screened in porch. Let me tell you something about the doors on my porch.

A few months ago my wife got worried that the cats would push them open since they were only held closed by a screen door spring. So she nagged me into installing screen door locks on them so they would not come open. This worked great until the day I needed in through the door that I had not unlocked because I had come out of the other door.

To make a long story short, they caught me and stung me about five times before I was able to get to the unlocked door and get inside the porch.

When the swelling goes down I need to go get another can of RAID.

I don't want start all over again with a fishing boat and an old truck.

gowain