solarbird reported after we got back from Canada that she found the cats playing with a MOTHRA-SIZED hornet that they’d caught in the kitchen–and that after that, she’d realized that a few days before, the cats had been realizing something was going on, because George had kept looking at her with this “Hey, do you hear that?” look on his kitty face, and then staring up at the walls.

Once the cats caught the hornet, though, that pretty much necessitated calling in a professional. Who showed up yesterday and informed Dara that we had the worst nest he’d seen all year, with approximately 600-800 hornets in it. This, I can assure you all, is NOT an area in which I want our household to excel. He wound up hitting the nest with two different extermination products, and didn’t even take a check from Dara because he intended to come back (tomorrow, as I write this) to follow up and make sure the job’s actually completed.

Since his visit yesterday Dara and spazzkat have between them caught three different hornets getting into various parts of the house. So apparently there have been a few daughty little survivors fleeing the nuking of their hornet colony, and presumably if left unchecked they will band together on a tiny hornet Galactica in search of tiny hornet Earth. Except we’re going to go all Cylon on them. There are many copies and WE HAVE A PLAN.

Dara’s phobic about bees and wasps and hornets. I’m not, but you know what? 600-800 hornets is enough to make me cringe, too. That is entirely TOO MANY HORNETS, no matter how you slice it. Hopefully the exterminator will make sure we don’t have any other stragglers. We’ll see how tomorrow goes!

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Fred Vs. Robot

There’ll also be video of both cats reacting to the robot as soon as I can figure out how to post it!