Crikey!

I was outside with the dog just after lunchtime and thought I’d check my post box. Sure enough, this week’s batch of junk mail had arrived so I opened the front door of the box to retrieve it. As I did so, a large swarm of angry wasps came hurtling out and began buzzing all around me, so being a wimp when it comes to angry insects with re-loadable stings in their back sides, I decided to beat a hasty retreat to grab my ‘anti-volants’ spray that dispatches flies, mosquitoes and wasps, among others, in double quick time.

By that time the initial swarm had abated and armed with my new-found dutch courage and spray can, I fearlessly advanced into the lions’, or more correctly, wasps’ den and gave them a good blast. Several took it full on and fell mortally wounded onto the bottom of the mailbox but others, who were either more sensible or less foolhardy than their comrades in arms, took the hint and legged it – I mean winged it. But word takes a while to get around among the greater wasp community and still a few insisted on returning to try again, so I gave full rein to my itchy button finger and let them have it full on too, whereupon they suffered the same fate as their comrades in our earlier skirmish.

I then went off thinking that by now they’d surely have got the hint only to find when I returned that this time not only were there still a few brave souls flying around the entrance to the mailbox but there were also some fat grubs squirming around on its floor inside. There was only one place that they could be coming from, which was from up inside on the roof of the mailbox, where I couldn’t see, so I went off in search of a suitable implement to shove up and shake around inside. That turned out to be a hammer. Not the most suitable tool for the job, I agree, but adequate under the circumstances, and when I shoved it up and shook it inside the mailbox, a dome-like waxy object around five inches in diameter fell down. It was still half full of the grubs which had been falling down inside the mailbox and when I knocked it out onto the ground, this is what it looked like.

The grubs in the centre were fat and white while the ones further out towards the edge were smaller and pinkish in colour, but I’m not enough of a wasp expert to know if that signifies anything. What I do know is that it was lucky for both the post lady and me that neither she nor I were stung by the angry swarm of wasps that had been paying court to them while they were in residence in my post box.

And this wasn’t the only unfortunate surprise that I got today (well OK, last night actually). My trusty little 5″ GPS that contains the Memory Map system and charts that brought me safely and accurately all the way down from England to the Dordogne has gone on the blink. Just so I knew it was working OK, I put in the route for the short flight from the cow field to Galinat on Saturday, and it worked fine. As I’m now planning my next airborne foray and have worked out a little local flight taking in Plazac, Rouffignac, Montignac and several local chateaux, I wanted to put that route in next. However, I was really disappointed to discover that in the 24 hours since the Galinat flight, something has gone wrong with it and although it still connects to my PC through Activesync, it won’t now accept data. I’ve tried it in Windows 7 and on another Windows XP PC without luck, so it looks as though it’s a fault within the unit which seems like something to do with not now being able to read its micro-SD card. Sad, because although I can use the 7″ GPS unit that I usually keep for use in my car, that doesn’t have a screen that’s anything like as bright, which is why I originally stopped using it in the aircraft. However, I’ll just have to make do with it for the time being 🙁