So small, so intimidating

Hornets are terrifying creatures, and three of them have been disposed from my dorm room within the past week.

I actually spent just about half an hour on the phone with my mom discussing my plan of attack on one of these little devils. She and I had been talking for ten or so minutes when I saw a nice sized black mass moving across the wall to my right. When I focused in on the drooling beast, I leapt up and threw myself against the door, screaming to my mom that there was a large flying insect on my wall. In retrospect, for those 30 minutes that thing was alive in my room, it owned my room. Although my room was full of my stuff, it wasn't mine anymore. It was this hornet's stuff. It buzzed about as it pleased, from bed to chair to jeans to window. And I moved accordingly, trying my best not to take up the thing's oxygen.

I managed to kill it by smushing it between the curtain and the window when it couldn't see me (or so I would like to think). It fell into the radiator, though, so for all I know, it could perform some crazy stunt and come back to life to make babies in the radiator and kill me in my sleep. Let's hope that's not the case.

At any rate, once I killed the hornet, I found a second one already dead and curled up in the corner of the window. Oh boy, this meant there was a nest nearby and that these little beasts were somehow crawling in through some hole in the screen. What the hell? Not fair. Not fair at all.

After living in fear for a number of days, my boyfriend (Matt) convinced me to open the window once again so that we could breathe the sweet air of the outdoors. I was hesitant (oh SO hesitant), but I complied. There were no hornet problems for a while...until yesterday, when Matt had just gotten back to the dorm with some to-go food from Norris. He flung open the curtains to reveal a nice, big, juicy hornet just chillin' on the screen.

He took just about 30 seconds to find some paper towels and murder the hornet, but the experience was frightening enough for me to say, "I told you so."

We then found a roll of duct tape that had been stuffed in a bag in my room, and Matt taped the entire perimeter of the window, leaving no room for error...no room for these inch-and-a-half long creatures to re-enter and terrorize our human lives.