Would everyone whose genomes do not contain exactly 46 chromosomes please vacate the premises immediately?

This means YOU, antmind. Feathered friends. Cute li’l gophers and raccoons. Eight-legged buddies. Numerous insectivorous pests munching in the garden, chewing on my books and masticating in my closet.

Mother Nature and I haven’t always seen eye to eye, but this is getting ridiculous.

A week ago I awoke to a large black blob on the ceiling, about 20 feet away but  heading steadily in my direction. I’m blind as a bat without my glasses, so if I could see it, it was significantly bigger than a dustbunny.

Put my glasses on and, sure enough, a very large spider was galloping across the ceiling toward my canopy bed (not the spider at right, that was a pet spider I had in the garage, but I like the shot).

I got up, stripped (I have a philosophy about spiders falling into clothing that probably requires therapy), put on my shoes and picked up my dorsoventral flattening device, i.e., a stick. The spider paused, considering its options, and I whacked at it.

It dropped behind a wall mirror. Or maybe into the clothes basket that I subsequently placed on the bed.

A strenuous effort to find him failed, so I moved into the guest room.

A week later (still in the guest room), I retire for the night, set the burglar alarm and head for the shower. There, on the master bedroom wall, is Mr. Big. I grab a tissue, creep up behind him, pounce…and miss.

Spider leaps off the wall, lands on my shirt (this is why we strip before killing spiders), and heads for my neck.

I shriek, set off the burglar alarm, whack at my clothing, grab a shoe and with an almighty WHOMP smash the spider into my chest. The spider explodes across two rooms, the bruise on my chest promises to be an amazing one, and I get another call from the burglar alarm people…but I’m relieved that I can finally move back to my bedroom.

Then I think…what if that was a DIFFERENT spider…and head back to the guest room.

It’s epidemic. This week I noticed an ant on a dish in the kitchen sink. I squished it and smelled my old antmind buddy, Tapinoma sessile. And where there’s one, there’s usually…I found a line of ants marching across the kitchen counter. (It’s black granite, so they’re harder to spot than you’d think.)

The antmind and I have had words in the past, so I knew immediate action was required. I scrubbed the counters down (removing scent trails) schpritzed antkilling potion around the perimeter of the house and the outside windows, and, er, got better about doing the dishes.

It seemed to work; I haven’t seen an ant in the kitchen in three days.

But I headed up to the bathroom to shower (and remove ant spray); found three silverfish in the bathtub. Come ON.

The thing about silverfish is, you can spray and you can squish and you can tent the whole bloody house and bomb it with mustard gas or something…but silverfish will survive. (They’re sorta the Keith Richards of the bug world) They live in cedar-shingled roofs and there’s not much you can do about them, I’m told, except learn to love them. Or get a new roof.

birdflueSo I leave the shower shyer by 3 silverfish (they’re floating out the drain and down to sea somewhere), dress and go outside to pick a few blueberries for breakfast. I’m immediately divebombed by angry birds, warning me off their berry bushes.

It’s not much of a deterrent (Alfred Hitchcock notwithstanding, these are pretty mild-mannered birds and we usually get along just fine), but their level of hostility was unnerving. I escaped with only a couple of pecks, and a double handful of breakfast.

Headed back out to the backyard to track down a suspected sprinkler leak, but it may have been fixed. Instead of a sodden swamp, the lawn was nicely dry and firm. It has dried up so much, in fact, that a family of gophers (or maybe moles) has moved in and made nice, big mounds of dirt right in the middle of the grass.

You really can make a mountain out of a molehill…if you have as many molehills in your backyard as I had in mine.

At this point I’m getting pretty tired of Mother Nature.

I have an uneasy truce with the raccoon family that lives under the back deck: If I leave a couple bins of water on the deck for their bathing pleasure, they won’t trash the deck. We’re still negotiating the yard lights; they carefully unscrew them from their posts every time I put them back. The message is obviously “Don’t light our yard at night,” and so far there doesn’t seem to be a happy compromise.

The water had evaporated from one of the bins and I’d forgotten to replace it; in retaliation the raccoons overturned a box of plaster I’d left on the deck. They dipped paws in the water in the remaining bin, mixed until it was a nice consistency and carefully plastered much of the back deck with little raccoon footprints.

As abstract art it wasn’t bad, but it probably wasn’t doing the deck much good.

Sigh. I’m trying to be a good Portlander, live in harmony with Nature and all that, but isn’t there a clause somewhere that says Nature ought to live in harmony with me, too?