Being Bugged

When I was little (somewhere in between wanting to be a conductor and a nursery school teacher), I wanted to be an entomologist. Firstly because I really liked playing with bugs, but now I think the main reason might have been to see the slightly baffled look on people's faces as they tried to figure out what this 6 year old just said. (It just felt really good to know the meaning of a word when grownups didn't)

I especially liked beetles, and I would spend hours making them beds, giving them baths, rubbing them in with cream ... and being very surprised when they stopped moving after I had cared for them so well.

I also had a series of daddy longlegs spiders that lived under my bedlamp and caught all of my mosquitoes. Unfortunately the last one disappeared a while ago (presumably during one of my mother's furious cleaning sessions) and that brings me to the original reason for this post - mosquitoes.
Since I no longer have a handy (and eco-friendly) deterrent for them, I was kept up half the night listening to that annoying whine and flaying around in the dark. Of course, when I finally got fed up enough to put on the light and do a proper search and destroy, not one of the little fiends were anywhere to be found.
And to prove that this was not just part of a very elaborate sleepwalking style dream, I am now covered in at least a dozen infuriatingly itchy bumps.

A similar story about a Parktown Prawn.