Tired today, and facing a week of intensive student evaluation. The grades for my class are due on Friday. I try to finish up by Thursday night, so that students have a day to react before I actually get the list to the registrar. It is possible to change a grade after that, but I try to avoid extra paperwork. Up to five students per semester ask me to explain their grade - and occasionally I do make a mistake in my spreadsheet. But more often students who did very little in class and so failed or ended up with D- try to get a higher grade, and most often students who did well (B+ or A-) try to get A- or A, respectively.

The weekend was active. Lots of yardwork on Saturday, and a Mother's Day trip on Sunday to South Deerfield, MA where we met the in-laws, went to Yankee Candle and then out to dinner. On Saturday, as I was moving hosta, hosing off the resin furniture, weeding between the bricks of the walkway, and anticipating planting that 5 pound bag of green beans from Seeds of Change, I was thinking about bugs. Something I like about winter in the northeast is that in late Fall there's a frost - and bang, the bugs are gone!

Now, honey bees are always welcome. Also, I plant beneficial flowers near my vegetable garden to attract "good" predator insects that eat "bad" crop-detroying bugs, so I am not referring to being creeped out by bugs in general. What I mean is, I don't like the seasonal infestations of pests. I especially don't like the annual Spring scourge of ants that appears in the kitchen. Then, last July, pantry moths hatched out of a big bag of dog food and by October, forced me to throw away an entire pantry of food. As far as mosquitos go, don't get me started.

I won't use pesticides, an exterminator, or insect repellent. I have found some effective natural products for moth control in Gardens Alive. The ants I either ignore until they disappear, capture and release outside, or kill them manually the minute I see them - depending on my mood and philosophy that season. When I was a very little kid, on a visit to Florida, I got hung up in an anthill, and red ants swarmed on me and bit my legs. What an awful experience! The ants in my kitchen are not those red, tiny things but big, black ones.

I do confess to having a can of unscented Raid, which is reserved for the occasional wasp or yellow jacket that makes its way into the house. I am too scared and incompetent to capture and release or manually kill wasps, and I am terrified that one of the dogs will try to get them. Sophie was stung last summer, and as she is a very allergic dog, her reaction was frightening, and required an emergency call to the vet. Rudy likes to catch flies, so I'm afraid if it was in the house, he would try to get a wasp, too. I spray nothing else; not even spiders, even though in the 1980s I was deathly ill on Fourth of July holiday from being bitten by a brown recluse (fiddleback) spider (they are poisonous). But I know spiders are good bugs, and as long as they avoid me (and are not too awful looking), I do my best to avoid them.

Anyway, this year, we had a couple of weird days in April that were 95 degrees - about a million wasps hatched out. They had nests on the porch, in the awning, near many of the house windows. Although I have the wasp killer, I don't want to use it very much, so I thought, "why didn't I search for and knock down all the wasp nests I could find when it was cold outside?" An army of ants appeared at the same time. Then it dipped below freezing; it may even have snowed. The weather has returned to normal, and I don't notice the wasps. But I think the ants were impervious, because they are back.

Yesterday, after Yankee Candle, we stopped at a butterfly sanctuary called Magic Wings. There was a greenhouse-type room that you can go in, with exotic and beautiful plants, and butterflies of every description flying around. It was incredible. The place was packed. It struck me that if it was another type of insect - mosquitos or wasps or spiders or ants - how freaked out we all would be!

I received a very nice email, from John Kavanaugh, the man who manages the Port Authority's memorial website, reporting that my story about Sirius, the only dog to die in the World Trade Center (see my April 24 entry), has been posted on the website.

I have been doing a little surfing in the weblog world. I am intrigued not so much by any one particular journal but by the phenomenon itself. More on this subject in the future, but at the moment, after reading some of the weblogs of various people, I can envision the need for two journals: one an off-line bound volume, filled with scribblings about its online rival!