Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc?

For years life has been good here at Casa Chaotic.  The cats took care of the rodents.  My dogs had no fleas.  I lived in harmony with wasps who nested only in the eaves of my outbuildings and flew search-and-destroy missions against cabbage moths.

Then Mary moved in across the driveway.  On Wednesday Edgar's groomer Germaine told me she had found "about eleven fleas".  Later that day Mary asked me to come over and check it out: Conspicuously energetic yellowjackets were massing around her eaves, increasing exponentially by the hour.  Then yesterday she informed me that the electricity had gone out in half her houselet.

I invested a fair part of the grocery money on enough Advantage to slather on 13 dogs and two cats.  I summoned an electrician who replaced a faulty outlet in the houselet, and an exterminator who gravely held his ear to Mary's living room wall for what seemed to me to be a very long time.  "Do you want a glass or something to hear better?" I asked him.  "Nope," he said, "I can hear them just fine."  There were lots of yellowjackets inside that wall, probably representatives of all building trades, maybe working in concert to erect a sports stadium or a union hall. 

Mary had to find a way to get all six of her cats away from the premises -- which she did by putting five of them in a dog kennel on the front porch and making the sixth cower under her bed.  The exterminator donned his hazmat suit, complete with gloves and face netting.  The battery is dead on the camera or I'd have taken a picture to show you.  It was wonderful to watch.  He carefully sprayed stuff and told us that if we still saw a lot of yellowjackets on Monday we should call him.  He said they would ingest this stuff and die on the spot, sort of like Jonestown and Kool-Aid.

Fleas, bum electricity, yellowjackets -- can we expect a plague of locusts next?  I don't really think Mary's causing all this stuff. 

But I intend to keep a sharp eye on my first-born son, just in case.

Comments

[Libby]

Don't forget the locusts! :)

[Lorette]

And frogs, don't forget those. If you see hoards of frogs, run like hell.