Here's a cropped part of an acccidental photo I took at my home town's cemetery. I had stopped by the grave of an old friend; he was younger than me, but we rode the bus together for years. His mom and mine were friends, we lived only a few miles apart.
He had no flowers on his stone, so I decided to take some of the extras I had brought along and place on his grave. I usually also pull a few weeds around the stones and there was a particularly stubborn clump of goatheads just under a beautiful praying cherub statue. I moved the statue over and transferred my camera from one hand to the other so I could get my pocketknife out to cut the roots of that horrible sticker-producing weed.
(I hate those things, they're all over, the stickers get on your pants and shoes and when you get out of your car and cut across your lawn you've just started your own goathead patch. We had so many of the ******* things on our football field, the coaches would make us pull them up during our water breaks, we called it "Goathead Bowl" )
About that time, a swarm of yellowjackets/wasps came boiling out of the hole visible at the bottom left of statue in the following picture:
(click for larger view)
We Texans are prone to exaggerate, but I swear there were several thousand extremely angry wasps in the surrounding air in one second. Ok, ok, maybe a hundred, but they WERE P.O.'d.
The rest of the photo is blurred, as are the little yellow bits that are the wasps. Their wings were going ninety miles an hour, but if I'd have had the camera tilted a little bit more, you'd have seen a blurry pic of my fat butt going 100mph, heading in the other direction.
I've been stung before as a youth, by all sorts of bees, scorpions, spiders and such and came out fine. My dad, though, as he got older, became deathly allergic to them. Pop passed on the baldness gene and an often petulant nature to me so I'm just figurin' I should prob. stay away from wasps now that I've gone past the half-century mark.
And momma, if you're reading this from heaven, this is one of those cases a person SHOULD run with a knife in their hand. I'm no cherub, not even close to being a mature angel, but I looked like that (praying) when I got in my pickup and rolled up the windows. I also put 14 slashes in my dashboard with that knife, too, rolling up the window.
