This week has been very tiring, fun, but tiring. I think I mentioned in the email last week that we had some co-workers coming into town for the week. They had a blast here, they drove our car, drove autos, visited Charminar, bought pearls, ate biriyani, had the whole Hyderbadi experience. They almost packed our whole 6 months worth of adventure into 9 days. Wow. I’m impressed.

Here’s our exciting news for the week:
Yesterday afternoon Grandma was filling up Claire’s baby pool on our upstairs balcony and Claire was playing happily. After they had been out there for about 5 min grandma looked up at the overhang over the patio. There was a mass of bees about 15 or 18 inches across and hanging down nearly 2 feet. A huge living stalactite. They went rushing into the house leaving pool, toys, sippy cup, everything right were they were.

Grandma called down to the maintenance office (after an unsuccessful call to the laundry room) and they let us know that they would be up to take care of the ‘hOneeBees’ between 8 and 10 pm.
Another trip down to the office at 9 pm netted us a visit at about 11 pm. They wanted to wait until most of the people in the apartment building were asleep—makes sense.
3 guys show up at the door at about 11pm, one carrying one of the really big backpack style pump sprayers, and boy did he smell. It was an aroma similar to hanging out in the pesticide section at your local Earl May, plus that camphor smell in urinal cakes (can you tell Clay wrote this part of the email?), plus a bit of diesel fuel. They went right up stairs, turned out all the lights inside and the guy with the backpack went out onto the patio. I hear what sounds like someone holding their finger over a watering hose, and his little pump arm keeping that thing pumped up.

This guy was out on the patio for nearly a minute and by the time he came into the relative safety of the living room the bees bashing themselves against the window sounded like the hardest rain you have ever heard. When he came in about 20 or 30 bees came in with him, no big deal, all things considered.
I, on the instruction of the leader of our bee killing gang, turned on the light above the stairs to draw all the bees together. He asks for a fly swatter, which I grabbed plus our electronic tennis rackets. I start zapping them, so they fall stunned onto the steps, then he smacks them with a swatter. It was awesome.

Through this adventure we did discover where some of our mosquito problem is coming from; the bees were actually able to get under the closed sliding window and into the house. If these monsters can get through, you know the skeeters are getting in that way too.
Another 20 min and the chemicals had taken their effect and it got pretty quiet outside. Done dealing. The backpack guy came back this morning, did one more sweep of the bee fog and cleaned up all of the dead bees. It was a site…I will try and get the pictures of the aftermath up on the photo site this weekend. Not a single survivor.

Claire stuff:
Wednesday night while Claire was taking a bath she was covering her hand in bubbles, then dumping a bucket of water on her hand to rinse it off. That was a lot of fun, so she decided that she needed to do the same thing to mommy’s hand, then mommy’s other hand, that got boring. So she yelled, “daddy, daddy-doo!” No response, so she tried another option, “daddy, chelo!” That means, “Come on daddy, hurry” in Hindi. She finally turned it around on him, Clay always tells Claire, “Chelo” when we are on our way out the door, but she is moving too slowly.


Sincerely,
Julianna Ehlers