The Bees Knees

Quote of the Day: "Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until you hear them speak."

We finally had a cold front come in, it seems. Thank heaven. I love those cool Autumn mornings, when the school year begins and the kiddos get to wait for the bus, and it's crisp outside. Then the leaves turn, and its beautiful for about 2 weeks, and then we usually get a strong wind and the next morning all the trees are bare and their leaves have all blown into the next state, but I digress...I LOVE Fall!

First, can I tell you how excited I am to see this movie: GO HERE for a preview of "Pride and Prejudice"--too bad I have to wait until mid November--yummy yummy yummy. I love Jane Austen films, and this one promises to be a good one.

Okay, on to my story: Sunday morning, Thing One and I decided to go for a 2-mile walk before Church. So, we set out, and enjoyed the breeze and the pretty scenery, and halfway home, she told me that a yellow jacket (or a bee, we couldn't tell) was in my hair.
So, I shook out my hair, and she (being seven years old) started screaming and telling me that it was now IN my hair, at which point I unclipped my hair and started whipping my hair around in some absurd parody of a Breck Girl Commercial, to try and scare the yellow jacket/bee/whatever away. But she screamed that he had now lodged himself on my neck, and I had no choice... but to start doing my "Bug Dance." This is a dance I do in the hope that the bug will be thrown off. It's not intentional, it was dubbed my "bug dance" by a high school friend, (and she told me it was so entertaining to watch that she was going to charge admission, but that's another story).

Let me just preface by saying that I do NOT like bugs. You could seriously "do me in" mentally if you held a cockroach up to my face, or a spider--and the fear of being stung by bees is right up there with dark moldy basements and my fear of Clowns (which I will NOT discuss here).
I have had two embarrassing occasions where I have had to do my "bug dance" in public, and yesterday made three.

I started doing my "Bug Dance", which is a hybrid mix of Belly Dancing/Russian Folk Dance/Irish Jigging, (lets just say I look like a possessed Spastic when I do it) and Thing One (who was in hysterics at this point) managed to tell me that I now had TWO bees dive-bombing me simultaneously, and that was my cue to stop dancing in place and start RUNNING while doing the Bug Dance.

Of course, at this point a truck drove by and the driver had the audacity to ask me if I was OK, and I told him (while swatting furiously at the air around me and still doing my Breck Girl Imitation) that I had a bunch of bees on me and the git actually suggested that I hold still.
Hold still for what? To let them do their businesss on me? Sting me? WHAT? They weren't leaving me alone! At this point a third bee started targeting Thing One, and she ran screaming down the street and I decided to run after her. Maybe we could outrun the bees.

They seemed to give up after half a block, and Thing One and I were both sweaty and flustered. What had made the bees Blitzkrieg attack us like that? We continued on our walk, and I kid you not, I had at least four more bees take an interest in me on the way home.

We figured out that running only made them follow us faster, but the Bug Dance worked every time. And now that I've totally made a fool out of myself by even admitting to the bug dance, I think I'll just file it all away and leave with the burning question:

What made us so interesting to the bees yesterday? Apparently, they like sweat, and we had definitely worked a nice sheen up, walking in the sun. So that explained why they were dive-bombing the back of my neck. But I'm still a bit mortified, because all my neighbors probably think I've got Schizoid tendencies, and they probably think it's genetic because my daughter and I were both behaving the same way.

...Or they could just think we both have shiny, beautiful, bouncy Breck hair...