Mosquitoes

I have a love-hate relationship with mosquitoes. I hate them and they, unfortunately, love me. Apparently I have the kind of blood that is the equivalent of a fine mosquito Beaujolais. For some reason, they ignore my husband and home in on me. It's not just the nearby mosquitoes that stick me, either. They apparently have little mosquito cell phones and contact their buddies to come munch, too.

"Hey, Bobbie?"
"Yeah, Janice. Whaddya want?"
"Listen, Bobbie--Jae's outside! PAAAAARRRRRTTTTTYYYYY!!!!!111one11one!!!oneone!!!"
"Same house?"
"Yeah--the one with the 'meat here' sign that we painted in IR above the door"
"Cool. We are soooo going to feast. I'll bring the carbon dioxide and we'll really make it a party!"
"Awesome. I'm going to go call Marcia, Jan, Cindy, Dixie.... Hey, bring some friends, too, Bobbie!"
"Will do! Laterz!"

Then they proceed to descend down upon me. I can have on 4 cans of Deet, have 18 bug zappers humming, one of those new-fangled mosquito bait kind of things, and enough citronella torches burning to bring out the fire department, and they'd still find me. It's just not fair.

It's really sad that on the 4th of July when we were setting off our complement of fireworks, I actually wanted to go sit in the smoke to get rid of the darn things. No, don't ask if those were legal fireworks. I have not investigated the state code on fireworks here. Nor do I want to. Ignorance is sometimes bliss. Suffice it to say that a. ours were not as big as the guy's down the street, (his required a cannon to launch), and b. no police came to visit. Since the fireworks were out in the middle of the street, we could all have plausible deniability, not unlike politicians. "Who, us, officer? Oh, no, we found them in the street like that....Why are we all sitting at the edge of the street in lawn chairs?....We're watching our neighbors' fireworks...Oh, no, we'd never dream of lighting illegal fireworks....Oh, these are too big? Well I'm sure whoever put them in the middle of the street will be very grateful for that piece of education. We'll make sure to tell them."

After getting bit like 12 times, I figured out where the wind was blowing and would have moved my lawn chair to that spot had it not been in the middle of the street. I didn't want to become squashed by a car as effectively as I squash mosquitoes, so I lived with not being able to sit in the smoke.

What we need is for some great geeky mind to come up with a mosquito vacuum that sucks them out of the universe. However, I'll settle for something that sucks them out of my small corner of this world.