But I can see that this will require some background; so I warm to my task. I will start with a confession; I am an envious person. Worse, even, I envy my own offspring! "How so?" you may ask; I will tell you. You may not believe this, but until yesterday I have never been stung by a wasp! EVER!
For some reason, wasps have never particularly enjoyed my company. I don't know if it is due to pheromones, bad attitude, my alpha nature, or just my bad Body Oder, but it just doesn't happen. All my children get stung around our little farmlet,; every summer it seems that nearly all of them get stung. Not me; I'm the odd man out. I've lived in the country nearly my whole life, and nobody spends more time outside than I do; but No Dice. So I started expressing my disappointment to my kids for the last several years, and being the adoring children that they are, and knowing my deep longing to be stung, they always come and tell me the likely spots with the largest nests. It seems we have an inordinate amount of wasp nests around our little farm for some reason; like I say, the kids are always coming up stung, but anyway, I'll follow the kids over to the garden shed, picnic table, garden fence, etc and grab a short stick on the way and just knock down any old wasp nest I see.
It quite infuriates the Wasps; they dive bomb my head and buzz me angrily as the kids watch from a safe distance, rooting for the Wasps. But there is never any consummation of that gleeful intercourse between man and insect that seemingly everyone has enjoyed but me, until yesterday that is.
I was in the pasture picking up square bale twine from bales the newly pastured pigs had torn up when I noticed (being a naturally observant sort of chap) several bumble bees flying in and out of an old bale laying on the ground. I'm no rocket scientist (like my father-in-law) but I could put two and two together! I knew there was only one thing to do. I kicked that old straw square bale apart! It turns out that Bumble Bees are kind of aggressive! An entire phalanx of angry Bees swarmed out. One big dude buzzed me several times and when I didn't leave, he finally zapped me right on the shoulder. That was great and all, but he acted like he might kind of like to continue to do it some more. I was completely unarmed at the time, so I ended up whipping my shirt off and knocking him to the ground and stomping on him.
Ahhh! How sweet it is! I finally get to join that exclusive, elusive "People Who Have Been Stung by Things With Stingers Club." So, as I said, after we ate supper, I called the neighbors, invited them over for my celebration and me and Herself jumped in the truck and tore off to town to get the celebratory Ice Cream and Cones. It was something of a hurried and raucous celebration, but you know, any excuse to eat ice cream is a good one...
I will say, that the kids pointed out a couple of things, though. Firstly, they said that technically, the Bumble Bee isn't really a wasp, but since it has a reputation of being worse than a wasp, they were generous enough to call it good enough. And secondly, even though nobody audibly doubted my story, everyone was wholly unimpressed with my welt that I had. One comment I heard was "I've got chigger bites worse than that!!!" And I lost my chance now, I already killed all the rest of the Bumblebees; Oh, well, its hard to impress kids these days...
But at least I no longer need envy them!
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