[hauntedheadnc]

Stinkbugs are a lot of fun to deal with, especially in the fall and the spring. In the fall they're all coming inside to find a place to wait out the winter and tourists in hotels in particular find them a terror. In the spring they emerge from their indoor hiding places and blunder around looking to find their way back outside again. I worked in hotels for several years and starting in October you'd have well-heeled assholes calling down in conniptions and threatening to go elsewhere because they'd found one. Problem though, is that whether you're paying $500/night or $80/night, you're still going to have to deal with them. They're everywhere, in the nice hotels and neighborhoods, and in the shitty no-tells and housing projects. They're an invasive species and nothing eats them. Like Cartman, they run with twelve gangs and do what they want.

Meanwhile, the forests of Western North Carolina are pretty much under constant attack. The hemlock woolly adelgid has already killed off most of the wild hemlocks and the only ones to be found thriving are the ones in people's yards that they douse with pesticide on a regular basis. While this is going on pine beetles are killing the pines and emerald ash borers are doing what they do best and killing the ash trees. Plus, fungus is attacking oak trees, dogwood trees, and something is also eating the locust trees. They leaf out and look beautiful up until late summer and then every year something comes along and eats the locust leaves down to rusty scraps.