ILONA ANDREWS

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Caterpillar Invasion

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In all the excitement of the release and some unexpected family issues, we missed our wedding anniversary, which was on August 2. Twenty-two years. 🙂

Now we are being invaded.

We keep trying to put them back in the trees and grass, but they are insisting on a suicide march into the pool.  We lived here for 6 years and have never seen so many caterpillars.

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  2. Happy anniversary! Yeah I know how you feel my husband and I forgot our 5 year anniversary too, it was on the 23rd of July, we honestly didn’t remember at all, when we did it was 3 days later lol, we still haven’t done anything other than celebrating his birthday today. ?

  4. Happy anniversary, belatedly. Pool…..I tried to buy a house with an in-ground pool when I was house shopping a couple of years ago. They all sold 1-2 days before my appointments to look at them. There just aren’t that many up here, most people think pools are a nuisance.

  5. Congratulations on 22 years! It’s good that things don’t have to be celebrated on the exact day; you can choose when you have the time. Relax & enjoy!

    I have no advice re: caterpillars. Just out of curiosity, do you know what they become?

  6. Congratulations on your marriage’s longevity. May you truly ENJOY each other for decades to come.

  7. Happy Anniversary to you both! It’s my parent’s 40th next week so all five of us kids are going home to surprise them 🙂

  8. I think pesticides have screwed up the systems of a lot of insects (as well as wild animals. I feel so bad whenever sick bobcats are sighted). I’ve had ants do a suicide, one-way march into my freezer at 2 places where I used to live. No matter what I did to clean up the antsicles & disrupt the pheromone trail, they’d come back and resume the bataant death march until the hot weather finally ended. There would be a half year break, and the whole thing would start again the next summer.

    • If you spray the trail with febreez, it breaks the scent and they can’t find the freezer. Voice of experience here lol

  9. Happy 22nd Anniversary! How wonderful for the two of you. May each day going forward be better than the preceding one. 🙂

  11. Happy anniversary! We celebrated our 41st on the 1st. Being married to your best friend is a very good thing.

    • That’s just for slugs. I think you’d just end up with tipsy caterpillars. They’d probably band together and try to tip the patio furniture or some other frat boy prank.

  13. Yesterday at work I walked under a tree and literally ran into a succession of caterpillars just hanging from the tree. I’d prefer if they would stay on the ground. 🙂

    • There was a story about a bacteria/virus that created ‘zombie exploding caterpillars’ – you could probably google it.

  14. Belated happy anniversary wishes, hubby and I have been married 44 years this year! ?

    No idea about the caterpillars ? sorry ?

  15. Poor little caterpillars! You may have had a maast year last year with plenty of their favorite food leading to a population explosion. Not a lot to be done, unfortunately…

    Happy (belated) anniversary to you both; here’s hoping for another 22 happy years and more!

  16. According to Wikipedia, the 22nd anniversary is copper gifts. So I’m thinking a nice copper bracelet. (Or a bunch of old pennies, from back when they were mostly made of copper.)

    Congratulations!

  18. Happy anniversary! Copper cookware is a nice present, or if you can’t afford the full copper, copper core (which is a copper disk in between two stainless steel) cookware is nice too.

    As for the caterpillars, before I moved to Texas, I would see them crawling on top of each other to climb down a tree. I thought it was a rope until I saw them move. I thought to myself at the time “to heck with the invasion of the body snatchers, it’s the invasion of the caterpillars.” They died off when the weather changed.

  19. Congratulations on your anniversary and the sales of your exquisitely crafted book! Maybe spreading bird seed would help with the caterpillars.

  24. Happy Anniversary!!! This year hubby has to work so he will miss our anniversary and a few other big days too, but we plan to celebrate the weekend before he leaves.

  26. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY! weird about the caterpillars. Hope note something serious (tree/bush infestation). Also, thanks again for another best seller – FANTASTIC book!

  28. Happy Anniversary! We are celebrating our 9th on Wednesday ?! We have had a lot of caterpillar here this year as well, I would say I can send you my two littles to help but the last time I looked in the bucket they were putting them in it looked like a few were smashed so unless you want a bunch of dead ones that won’t work!

  29. Happy anniversary! Our 18th is on Monday. We may get around to celebrating it sometime this month 🙂

  32. Happy, happy anniversary. You two have had a heckuva year. Hope next year together is even better.

  34. Happy Anniversary to both of you!!! And congratulations on the fantastic book ratings. Absolutely loved Wildfire!

  37. Happy Anniversary! 22 years is terrific! I lived in southeast Arizona as a kid and every spring we would wake up to a community wide swarm of grasshoppers. There were so many of them crawling everywhere that the ground, streets and walls all looked like they were moving. I think they were looking for caterpillars. LOL

  39. Happy Anniversary! It looks like August was a good month – our 30th is on the 22nd.

    Until my daughter graduated from college last year, we were too busy and too broke to do much around our anniversary… 3 kids needing clothes and school supplies make for a slim budget. Maybe once the tuition bills have been paid …

  40. Happy anniversary!

    Maybe there’s a mystical White Tiger lurking nearby that’s attracting all the Lepidoptera in the neighborhood . . . ;-P

  44. Ah yes, the North American Suicidal Guilt Caterpillar. Tries to make you feel bad as it tosses away it life. Don’t know why it evolved this adaption.

  47. I find as we see more of our anniversaries behind us, the more we forget about them. Which might be a good thing, before the wedding, the restaurant we were supposed to be married at burned to the ground. Since I was working there part time as a waitress, that sort of smashed our budget. Fortunately, the owners found us a new place, paid for part as a wedding gift, and we just had to change the date, I blame it on the date change. 32 years later.

    You don’t want those worms to find a new home. In the pool is a good place for them.

  49. Happy Anniversary! We’ll be coming up on our 26th after Christmas this year. Unreal. Doesn’t feel that long at all.

  50. Happy anniversary! After meeting you both in Orlando, I can see how your marriage lasts: you truly love each other. My husband and I will hit 32 in September and can still make each other laugh. Maybe that’s the key.

  51. Many congrats on your anniversary. I hope many more will be in your futures, and many more years of happy memories.

    Good luck with the caterpillars. Maybe they are just thirsty?

  53. Happy Anniversary! I hope you are still together after another 22 years of happy memories!

  54. Neem oil in a spray bottle (1/4 oil to 3/4 water) is a good deterrent. They hate the stuff and it is non-toxic to them. Now if you just want to obliterate them then a pair of flip flops will do.

  55. You guys, my husband and I have been married for 33 years, and have missed our anniversary twice. Life gets in the way. We made up for it the next year, once by planning a romantic trip to Vegas, once by planning a perfect day hiking the Columbia river gorge, then having a lovely dinner at a winery.

  56. Aww congratulations! I’m heading towards 30 years this October. My husband, my son & I will probably just go out to dinner.
    My friend here in California had those caterpillars invading her home too. She doesn’t live far from me but I’ve never seen them…attracted to nice people perhaps?

  61. Probably an invasive species: gypsy moth caterpillars. If so, do your state a favor and KILL THEM. Gypsy moth caterpillar strip forests. Connecticut tries to prevent their destructive ways with a fungus. Crazy, but true: Maimaiga Fungus.

  62. Happy anniversary!!!
    As for the Catapillar’s, maybe you can reason with them and explain suicide marches into the pool or a very bad idea? I don’t know… Good luck.

  64. Happy anniversary, and many, many, happy returns of the day! We both missed ours one year as well. I was working and taking a couple of classes. My husband was in law school. It was exam time. I got to work, looked at the calendar. Looked again. Asked a coworker the date to confirm. I announced we’d both forgotten our anniversary. My coworkers had a field day.

    Lona’s comment that she and her husband missed theirs twice, but made up for it each time by planning an extra special celebration for each of the following years, was a fun way to deal with it. This December will be our 44th, so, as with Lorna and her husband reaching 33, missing one or two won’t even make a dent – no worries. Planning a special celebration for next year is good, but don’t let that stop you from celebrating now, even though you are a couple of days late!! I don’t think either of us has forgotten individually, though that might be because one or the other of us reminds the other ahead of time.

    Hey, tell the kids they dropped the ball! Happy Anniversary!

  65. Historical day. I was just listening to a talk on the Battle of Cannae, still studied to this day.

    Wishing you many more anniversaries.

  66. We’ve been married for 31 years and have missed about 6. I was at a conference for one and she was out of the country for the others including this year (she left 2 days before). We almost missed another but she showed up late at night at my conference. I was groggy and thought she was maid service. Once I packed an anniversary card deep in her luggage. And the airlines lost it. Fortunately they found it and delivered it to her on our anniversary. Whew.

    Let’s hope this is yours only one.

  68. Happy Anniversary! It will be easy for me to remember as it is also my son’s birthday. 😀

  69. Happy Anniversary!!

    And we had a crazy caterpillar explosion one year at my folks house many moons ago. I don’t recall what incited it but the critters were EVERYWHERE. Hasn’t happened since as far as I know. Was just odd.

  70. Unrelated to caterpillars, but not sure where else to ask, is there a published story relating what happens to Kate and Curren coinciding with the action in Magic Stars?

  75. Maybe it’s hot? Or cold? Or dry?

    I mean to say, weather.

    Ants used to commit suicide in my “sealed” water bottles at night in Vellore, India. It is a hot (routinely in the early 40 Celsius) and dry place, but some nights it got _cold_. Well, relatively cold, when you’re used to 40 C. And ants would die.

    The moral of the story is, eventually the deaths stop bothering you, and you learn to fish the cold, dead bodies out, and make use of the water as you planned. In my very vegetarian case, drink. In yours, perhaps swim?

    Unless it’s blocking stuffs for the pool. In which case I have no tangentially useful anecdotes to share.

    • ALSO. Happy anniversary! Will you be creeped out if I/we remember next year? (The answer to this question will determine if it goes into my calendar).

  77. Your trees probably told the caterpillars to go jump in the pool as they wanted to keep their leaves.

  78. I know the husband is the one who is suppose to forget about dates but I never could keep them straight. Today it’s a funny story that we tell together.

    Butterflies?

  79. Happy Anniversary late. I hope y’all got to do something fun.

    I actually ALWAYS forget ours. It’s a thing. John always gets to surprise me.

    On pool suicide. After we put the pool in we had that with these gigantic spiders all doing that. Like 100s. I really worried we had that many around us. It’s finally slowed down to about 2 or 3 a week.

  81. Are you sure the bugs are caterpillars? They look like millipedes. We took down some ivy before painting a house and were invaded by millipedes. We called the Orkin man.

  83. Heh. I am so utterly hopeless with romantic stuff and remembering dates that I ensured that (i) I proposed to my husband on a palindrome day (I knew that this would also be an important date to him, and, I hoped to make it more memorable to me. Nope. Did not work) and (ii) suggested that we get married on my company’s year end date (this one does work for me, but mostly because of my needless dread of the admin associated with company reporting and sorting taxes. Not particularly romantic, sadly). My poor husband. It is probably very telling that he is (a) very amused by all this and (b) he is an accountant.

    And, yes, I do put all important-to-him dates in my diary. I (mostly) remember the key dates as a result, but cannot for the life of me remember them when asked. Apart from the company year end/wedding anniversary one.

  85. It’s caterpillar season in the south. Look for white silky nests in trees. That’s where they are coming from

  86. Congratulations on your anniversary! I wish you many more. Good luck with the caterpillars.

  87. Happy Anniversary We just celebrated our 32nd . I got the date wrong by one day ! Isaid 27th instead of the 28th. My husband has never let me live it down! June 28th 1985 in Solano County.Ca.

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