I like words.  Not just the words themselves but the origins of words.  I don’t have a huge vocabulary but when I come across a word, or expression, that really says what I want to say I’m not shy about using it.  So when I decided to tell this story, I remembered the perfect expression to capture the essence of the event and that’s “Heebie Jeebies”.

It was actually coined by a famous cartoonist of the 1920s and 30’s by the name of Billy DeBeck who created the cartoon “Barney Google and Snuffy Smith” and, coincidentally, worked for newspapers in both Youngstown and Pittsburgh at some point in his career.  I don’t think many of us have actually seen his work, but Heebie Jeebies has endured and become part of American slang.  If you’ve never heard the expression, here’s how I would define it.

Earlier this month Peg was sitting at the dining room table with her IPad.  Yes, I did drink the Koolaid of the Apple Nazis and purchase an Apple product but only because they’re simple-minded, inflexible products and I figured Peg, who is not tech savvy, would be less likely to click on something damaging.  And I’m certainly not saying Peg is simple-minded or inflexible.  It’s just that, when it comes to electronics, the KISS principle is sometimes more practical.  So, as Peg was sitting there web surfing or playing Angry Birds, she heard a strange sound.  She described it as a vibration or humming that would come and go and she asked the rest of us if we had heard it.  Our friends Scott and Cindy Schade were up from Atlanta visiting but none of us had heard a thing.  This went on for several hours and we decided that maybe Peg needed to have her hearing checked.  This, of course, irritated her to no end but she finally managed to get us in the her corner of the room while it was happening and, sure enough, there was some kind of mysterious humming coming from the far corner of the room.  We quickly ruled out all electronic sources and when we walked out on to the back porch and looked around the corner of the post by the wall of the house we discovered the source.  There was a continuous flow of yellow jackets flying in and out of the hole at the bottom of a piece of vinyl siding inside-corner molding.

The siding has been there for over 20 years and bugs have never shown any interest in the molding but this year, for some unknown reason, some ambitious critter decided that the gap looked interesting.  I am not a fan of yellow jackets.  I fight an ongoing battle with the things.  Every year I have to wipe out at least one nest somewhere in the compound but they’re always in a hole in the ground.  This was different.  They were invading my turf and they had to be destroyed.  With extreme prejudice!

Over the next three days I sprayed them with every deadly chemical I could find.  I squirted the “sprays from 20 feet” stuff.  I injected the “foaming action” stuff into the hole from every angle possible and eventually their activity slowed to a trickle.  At that point I sprayed a little expanding foam into the gap, to keep them from building another nest, and declared the mission complete.  Fast forward three weeks.

I was on the phone with my brother-in-law Ben when, from the corner of my eye, I caught something flying by.  Thinking it was a fly, I glanced towards the lamp next to me, and realized it was a yellow jacket.  Panic ensued and, after quickly ending my conversation with Ben, Peg and I ineffectively swatted at the thing with anything we could get our hands on.  I headed for the kitchen to retrieve the flyswatter and as I ran through the dining room the heebie Jeebies hit.  The french doors that lead from the dining room to the back porch were covered with angry yellow jackets, on the inside!  I got to the kitchen and the kitchen window was covered with angry yellow jackets, on the inside!  It occurred to me that the flyswatter in my hand was, to say the least, inadequate so I grabbed a can of “sprays from 20 feet” stuff and started hosing down the dining room with products labeled “not for indoor use” and “use in a well ventilated area only”.  Yellow jackets were dropping like “flies?” and after the chemical fog of organo-phosphates settled we began a search for the source of our horrific infestation.  I looked up to the corner of the dining room, where the ceiling meets the walls, and there was a tiny hole with yellow jackets crawling out into the room.  More heebie jeebies as I jammed the nozzle of the bug spray into the hole and opened fire until the deadly liquid was running down the wall and no more yellow jackets heads were peaking from the hole.

Peg covered the hole with some packing tape, lots of packing tape, and I got on line and googled “bee infestations Pittsburgh”.   Up popped a company called “the Bee Hunter” and after a quick phone call and explanation of what had happened the “Bee Hunter”, Jim, used a phrase that I have never heard and don’t ever want to hear again.  He said that we had a “chew through”.  Just typing it makes my skin crawl!  I thought I had killed the nest earlier in the month but in reality I had simply sealed them in and pissed them off.  More had hatched and they had chewed through the joint compound in the corner of the room looking for a way out.

Jim came the next day, sprayed some really good stuff in the hole, cut out a section of the ceiling, removed the nest, taped up the hole, and told me to wait two weeks before I remove the temporary patch and plaster it over to make sure all of the stragglers were dead.  I’m actually not in any hurry to look under the cardboard and, rest assured, I will have a can of spray in my hand two weeks from now when I peel it back and I will have a monumental case of the heebie Jeebies.