I woke up with one hell of a bite on my neck the other morning.

Using my awesome powers of deductive reasoning, I’m led to believe one of the two following scenarios:

a) My wife is actually a vampire, something that coincidentally never came up before we got married, but now certainly explains the absence of garlic and wooden stakes in our home.

b) Admittedly more likely, the coming of spring has also brought forth the coming of bugs and it’s now time for me to pesticide the holy hell out of our house’s perimeter before we get invaded like in years past…

Frankly, I guess I probably should’ve seen this coming – I mean, I’ve lived here long enough now to understand that spraying for bugs each spring is part of that whole maintenance package that you just do, along with preparing the alligator hooks and setting the elderly nets and everything else that we have to do here in Florida to keep our pest problems under control. And that’s all fine and dandy, except for the one notable fact that I’m extremely lazy and despite numerous warnings, will no doubt put off doing all of that stuff right up until I’ve got reptiles crawling through my living room and somebody’s grandmother asleep on my couch.

The problem is, I’m apparently not very good at the whole maintenance thing in general, as evidenced by the last time my car has been washed … and that was pretty much only done out of guilt because we had company coming into town and I didn’t want them to think that I was mistreating my supposedly shiny, new car! Which is kinda odd if you think about it because although said car certainly gleamed in the sunlight as we cruised along the beach that weekend without a care in the world, there was no underlying fear of waking up to find it attacking me in the middle of the night!

Well, there was that one dream, but that’ll teach me to watch The Car That Ate Its Owner right before bedtime…

Nevertheless, B-rated nightmares aside, if there’s one thing that you just can’t afford to skimp on when you reside here in sunny Florida, it’s without a doubt the air conditioning … and after that, of course – well, pest control is most certainly a very close second, if not even a tie. I mean, really – sitting around all hot and sweaty, but bug-free isn’t all that much better than relaxing in your climate-controlled living room that also happens to be swarming with insects … it’s kind of a joint package, if you think about it! Fortunately, however, the air conditioning more or less takes care of itself, thus leaving me to neglect the other required maintenance around our home instead. And if you think I’m good at neglecting pest control, then you should see just how thorough I am when it comes to disregarding our pets!!!

I kid, I kid – of course, I treasure our beloved fish very much and I’m fondly looking forward to the day when I have to follow behind a furry, four-legged little guy in the middle of the night to scoop up his poop, too, however in the meantime we’re getting to the point where if I don’t take action about these six- and eight-legged freaks pretty soon, we’re going to find ourselves with a whole new breed of “pets” underneath this roof and believe you me, spiders and cockroaches are a lot higher maintenance than tropical fish! Besides, by now you’ve heard about my previous interactions with the insect kingdom – if word gets out that my defenses are down and they have time to mobilize an offensive, we can kiss this little suburban homestead goodbye…

Ultimately, however, you’ve just played key witness to my problem here because in the time that it’s taken to chronicle this ordeal from suspicion of vampires to mutant automobiles, I could’ve just as easily picked up some bug spray from the store, done a couple of death-dealing applications around the house, and still had time left to make myself a delicious grilled ham and cheese sandwich to boot, but instead I’ve procrastinated as usual and now all I’ve got to show for it is a handful of thoroughly-amused readers and a family of spiders rapidly advancing on my current location with all of the lead time that they needed to assemble a formidable army of neck-biting nasties!

And don’t get me wrong – I certainly appreciate your undying love and laughs, but as they say … somewhere or other, a crowd full of laughs won’t hold back the insect invasion as they come swarming into your humble abode like a flood with lots of tiny, little fangs. That is, unless a few of you happened to be free and could stop by with some bug spray and fly swatters … call me crazy, but an army of humor column-loving fans to thwart off an army of spiders and other creepy, crawly insects hell bent on biting me in the middle of the night just might work!

That’s it – problem solved! So just buzz the gate when you get here and in the meantime, I’m just going to skip ahead to the grilled cheese portion of that aforementioned plan because as far as I can tell, this pest problem is as good as licked!

Come to think of it, if you want to bring over some gloves fit for handling gators while you’re at it…