����Now as I see it, their big mistake was making it personal for the spousal unit.

����I've mentioned before that every fall large waves of ladybugs (a kind the experts call Multi-Coloured Asian Lady Beetles) roll out of the woods and try to find nooks and crevices to winter over in our home.

����Because it's a log cabin, there are roughly 1.3 billion nooks and crevices. So until spring comes and they fly off into the woods for all sorts of debauched bug sex fests, thereby ensuring that their children and grandchildren can continue to torment me, I vacuum ladybugs.

����Several times a day I inflict death by suckage on mass quantities of ladybugs, most of whom congregate in my windows in the mistaken hope that it's spring and time for the orgy to begin.

����I could suffer in silence, but where's the fun in that, eh? Instead, I have been known to pick up my small hand vac at crucial moments during tee vee programs and inflict suckage on the bugs because I just can't bear to see them crawling about anymore.

����It's been mentioned that the loud whirr of a hand vac coupled with a middle-aged woman swearing softly under her breath can break the mood of most any tee vee show, eh. Eyebrows Have Been Raised over this irrational behaviour, especially from a woman who has free range, cat-sized dust bunnies in her home.

����For years, the spousal unit felt that we should extend the Creepy Crawlie Mutual Non-Aggression Pact we signed with our spiders to the ladybugs. Under the pact, any spider that finds itself in the house during the winter gets to stay without disturbance until the spring as long as it doesn't do anything icky such as land on us in our sleep, or bite us.

����The spiders have kept their side of the bargain and I've kept mine which means that most winters there are corners of this house that would make a great set for that show Tales From The Crypt. That doesn't bother me because outside of the web business, the spiders keep to themselves.

����You know, if the ladybugs were equally self-effacing, we wouldn't have a problem. But they're not. They don't keep to quietly to discrete corners; they crawl EVERYWHERE, with a particular love of windows.

����When they feel threatened they emit a gas so noxious that the first time I smelled it I figured something moose sized had died in a freak methane explosion, a fart gone terribly, terribly wrong. I just couldn't believe something that small could stink so big.

����And to top it all off, they bite occasionally. I am sensitive to these bites, and my skin swells when they do it to me.

����The spousal unit pooh poohed my outrage at the critters, but then he has Man Feet and produces socks with Man Foot Odour, and thus is genetically programmed not to find the bug odour nearly obnoxious as I do.

����When they bite him, he doesn't swell up like I do. So, he basically had a live and let live attitude � until The Ladybugs Made Their Fatal Error.

����He was reflectively chewing on his breakfast Cheerios the other morning when he suddenly made a face that made me wonder if I was witnessing the beginning of a heart attack. He gasped out that one of the ladybugs, unbeknownst to him, had made a kamikaze dive into his bowl of Cheerios and he had just chewed said bug.

����EWWWWWWWW.

����Apparently, it tasted even worse than it smells.

����EWWWWWWWW.

����My spousal unit will put up with a lot, but Mr. Man you DON'T mess with his food. I would rather try to grab a bone from a rottweiler than come between my life partner and his grub. In his eyes, the attack on the Cheerios was an act of aggression so heinous it could not be tolerated, the ladybug equivalent of Pearl Harbour.

����Revenge. The spousal unit wanted revenge and The Hunt For The Ladybug Mothership was on.

����Every joint in the logs downstairs was searched by flashlight, tiny ladybug colonies loosened with wire and vacuumed out. But still we'd see ladybugs in our windows. Clearly, we'd only found outposts. Where was The Mothership?

����Saturday morning I decided to poke the wire up into a tiny crack in the top left ceiling corner of the alcove where our dining table sits. A veritable shower of disgruntled ladybugs rained down around me. Every time I put up the wire, a new shower of stinky, cranky bugs tumbled on the floor. It seemed to be without end.

����Upstairs, above the dining alcove, is an identically sized alcove where we've built in some bookcases and our bed. I don't have the strength to horse out our mattress and box spring to look under the bookcases, but the spousal unit does and he was A Man On A Mission To Protect His Cheerios.

����When he did disassemble everything, this is an extremely out of focus picture of a small part of what we saw. (Apparently my digital camera was as grossed out as I was by what was hiding in dark corners.)

����Yes, I had been sleeping Above The Enemy. A teaming mass of thousands of the enemy.

����EWWWWWWWW.

����But not for long.

����We have been smiting the ladybugs with mass quantities of vacuuming, but a fair number of the evil things are wedged in tight corners we can't get to with the vacuum. Fortunately, they're drawn to light and so we hope that they'll ooze out of their safe havens in the next few days. Last night we slept in our daughter's room so we could leave our mattress up and have another run at them tomorrow.

����We Will Prevail.

����Oh, and come spring, we're buying all the caulking we can get our hands on and caulking every crevice on the outside of our house we can find. It's war, and we're going to do our best to keep the enemy hoards from infiltrating. It's tedious work, but when energies flag we now we have our rallying cry to lift our spirits and keep our resolve firm.

����Yep, Texans may "Remember the Alamo" but us, we'll always "Remember the Cheerios."