::bursts into the house swinging on a vine…scoops up Cheri with free arm, kicks jar o’ bugs into the fireplace…lands atop the dining room table::
“Stay close, Red…”
::plants a firm kiss on Scotti…whips out flamethrower and torches living room::
“What have you done to my house??!! And where the hell did this vine come from??!!”
Oh Scotti, come stay here.
Bugs are icky. That’s what guys are for. I have very few requirements for guy friends. Smashing bugs is one of the absolutely nessesary.
You are such a sweet aunt. Can you keep the bugs outside? Garage? I think I could manage such a project if I could toss them in the shed and only deal with them when tossing potatos in.
Its iffy though. The fire solution would look real good real quick.
you take care of yourself babe.
Scotti picks herself up off the floor, dusts herself off and looks around for damage.
Whew…Poopah… That was a DILLY of a dream! Thank goodness it was a ONLY a dream- you torch my living room and I’ll…well, I’ll speak SEVERELY to you!
Kathryn, thanks sweetie! I’d come stay in a heartbeat, but that would mean this inconvenient 2000 mile commute…however, I DID move the bugs to the garage, so all is quiet now in the Scotti household.
For now, anyway:)
For the person who asked, the word is “entomophobia.”
I’m really glad you’ve committed to keeping the beetles safe from any unfortunate “accidents.” All the students would be terribly sad if their cute carapaced pets expired over the summer.
I feel for you, Scotti, I really do. You are a super aunt! Brave and unselfish and, you know, true!
I have a similar story, only mine didn’t go as well as yours has gone so far…
Back in the day, I was a daycamp counselor for kids aged 7 to 12. The focus of the daycamp was on science-y type things, with a new theme every week. I loved the astronomy unit. The volcanoes and geology unit was great, too. But then we did the unit on insects. Someone had read about a nifty experiment in which you place two foot-long lengths of dowel into putty, add a crossbeam at the top, stick the putty to the bottom of a plastic washbin, and fill the washbin with water. Then, you catch a spider and put it on one of the dowels. The idea is that the spider will be trapped by the water and will decide to build a web between the dowels. So far so good.
We send the kids outside with jelly jars and paper to catch the spider of their choice. Many children caught giant honking monstrosities that put Stephen King’s It to shame.
They bring them inside and place them on their little dowel-in-water structures, and then we all talk about what kind of webs they’ll build and what they might catch in them. Day ends, children and staff go home, leaving locked building. New day dawns, children and staff return, and find that not one–NOT ONE– of the dowel-in-water structures had a spider on it anymore. NOT ONE. Every friggin’ spider, including some of the giant ones that got allowed when they couldn’t find smaller ones, were gone. The water hadn’t trapped them, and now they were loose in the building. I spent the rest of the summer literally getting the shudders every time I thought of it. We turned up about 5 fugitive spiders, but there were 27 kids at the camp. It still gives me the shivers to think about it today.
That’s my long story, and I’m sticking to it.
Scotti, I just want you to know that because of this thread I now read your user name as “Scotti Itcher.”
Well, if they do get out, and you need help rounding them up, just call bughunter.
(Of course, I’m a programmer, not an entymologist, but I’m not terribly afraid of bugs, either.)
Or if you have a shop vac, or one of those newfangled “vortex” bagless vacuums with a hose attachment, you can go after 'em yourself.
Huh. I can eat an entire potato in twelve minutes. I must be really vicious!
Seriously, I’m pretty arthropodophobic (don’t eat shellfish, jump when things crawl on me) but you lot are serious cases. Wow. I feel relatively well-adjusted now.
Thank you so much for the term, Sengkelat! Now I can use that correct word in place of, “Get that thing away from me!! I am scared sh**less of bugs!” 
I can now call myself a true entomophobic. While others still refer to me as “a little buggy”. 
Yes dear, but…well, I don’t know if you are a petite woman or a big burly guy. I assume, however, that you couldn’t possibly weigh less than…say…80 pounds. Now, think about this. If I weighed that whole entire COLONY of beetles, I seriously doubt that they would weigh more than 8 ounces. It was a medium sized potato. So, you ate possibly (I am hopeless at fractions, so don’t jump all over me when I get this wrong) 1/80th of your body weight in twelve minutes. They ate DOUBLE their body weight in twelve hours…and they do it again EVERY twelve hours. You can’t tell ME they aren’t vicious. I am however, alternating potatos with apples…while they live with me, they are going to get a balanced diet. The LAST thing I need is to have them get bored! :eek:
I’d put some meat in there, but I prefer to think they are vegetarians…
Fine…I’ll send them to YOUR house for the duration. We’ll see how well-adjusted you are at the END of two weeks. 
Heh…thanks a bunch!
Now I may not be able to think of mySELF as anything else, either. I had idly considered changing my username to plain old “Scotti”-if I can’t get that mental image out of my mind, I may be next in line to email The Divine TubaDiva and have the thing legally changed.
I wonder, do you have to go to court and sign papers?
Hey wait a minute…I wonder if entomophopic is taken? Or just plain buggy? [sub]this last compliments of Silky Threat[/sub]
I have, as of Thursday, developed a slight bug phobia. Before then, I thought they were run of the mill icky, that’s all. But in the early hours of Thursday, I had a bug fly/crawl into my ear right after I returned from the bathroom. It was in my ear! Argghhhh! You can hear and feel that! I got it out with some warm water in when I decided to reschedule my shower to right then and there. But for the rest of the day I kept wondering, did I really get it out, really? I didn’t see it, it just wasn’t in my ear any more. I think it might have been the tiny moth on my pillow then, so the water had nothing to do with its removal, but… I duct-taped the fraction of an inch crack between the window fan and window after that. Wish I knew where the screen is…
Oh, now elfkin477 that puts my little bug problem in perspective. After all, mine are in the garage in a big plastic container…yours was in your EAR!
EWWWWWW!!!
((((((elfkins))))))
There…your very first ScottiHug! Hope it helps!
So, did there end up being any problems?