More adventures with creepy crawlies

Last weekend was hot and sunny, and I was determined to finally get my seedlings in the ground. I used chicken wire to reinforce the bottom of my fence and cover two feet of ground extending from the garden, and I surrounded the garden with another application of Liquid Fence for the deer. As I was working with the chicken wire, I found several ticks crawling on me, and tossed them back into the woods. So I wasn't too surprised later when I took a shower and found one attached to my stomach. Still, I hate having ticks attached to me, so I hurried from the bathroom to my bedroom to retrieve the tweezers while wrapped in a towel. When I arrived, I found myself in the midst of the massive annual mating frenzy of some insect species (termites?). This happened twice when I was living at Cacique, always in the kitchen, but this time, they all congregated in my bedroom. So I'm standing in my room surrounded by a cloud of clumsy, lovesick, and fragile insects that are fluttering around, landing, losing their wings, and scurrying around my floor in little two-car insect mating trains. After mating, they apparently die (I'm not sure whether there's an egg-laying stage that I'm missing, because otherwise the whole thing seems quite pointless). Grabbing the flyswatter that I fortuitously bought earlier that day, I swat a clear path across the room, grab the tweezers, and flee back into the safety of the kitchen. Hours later my room is still occupied by many live insects and growing piles of bodies and wings. Everywhere--all over my bed, my pillow, the glass of water next to my bed, my phone, my laptop, etc. So I spent the night on the sticky vinyl loveseat in the living room, and did a massive cleanup the following evening.

Several weeks ago I noticed a black widow that had built a web in a corner of the bathroom. I magnanimously decided that if she kept to her territory, we could peacefully coexist. Also, I couldn't figure out how to reach into the middle of her sprawling web and trap her without her falling or scurrying out of reach. But anyway, she kept her side of the bargain until this morning. While I was in the shower (why do these things always happen when I'm most vulnerable?), I noticed a male black widow hanging around up by the showerhead. When I got out of the shower to check on the original black widow, she looked much larger than I remembered. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but now I'm worried about massive crops of black widow babies, which surely violates her terms of the deal. So I returned, clothed, armed with a cup and a piece of cardboard, and cleared everything out of the area under the web, leaving a more or less white expanse of floor. I took a couple of swipes at the web with the cup, tearing the strands, and she held her ground. This is going well so far--I thought she would flee when she felt the vibrations. So I took one last brave swipe, felt her body plunk against the inside of the cup, and... I lost her. I have no idea where she fell. Obviously now she is going to find her way to my bedroom and lay her eggs under my pillow, which maybe serves me right if I can't keep track of a giant, black, slow-moving spider on a white floor.