...And for those who have met me, know me, or spoken to me on the phone, you know I don't ever do the girly shrieking thing. You know that this is a highly unusual occurrence. And for those who don't know me, this is...

A. HIGHLY. UNUSUAL. OCCURRENCE. Rare, I tell you. Almost non-existent. But last night, I shrieked like a girl.

It brought my DH running back into the kitchen where I was opening a bag of flour so that I could dredge some chicken and make lemon chicken piccata. I was ready to give up, by the way, because the chicken was my 4th choice of something to make for dinner because I didn't have ingredients for the previous 3 ideas, and I was getting really frustrated with that. Especially when I started cutting an onion up for the 3rd idea and found that it was black in the core of the onion (and the onion was not that old, trust me... we burn through onions in our house really fast). Ah, but I digress...

This was a previously unopened bag of flour. One that has been in the pantry for quite some time. I think many of you remember when I had bugs in my pantry? I think that flour is from back then. Guess what I found when I opened it?

That's right... a whole COLONY of bugs! It was Club Med for those little evil beetle things. I'm fairly certain that they're either confused flour beetles or red flour beetles. All I know is I saw a lot of those things inside my flour (we're talking probably a hundred here, if not more, all at the top of the bag), and I shrieked.

Big time, girly shriek.

Am I proud of this? No. I figured I was more adult than that. After all, I saw a leaf in the garage earlier that I thought was a mouse and I barely flinched. It was a hold-up-that's-a-mouse, no wait, that's a leaf sort of moment. No yell, no jumping away. Of course, you're reading the words of someone who rescued her scared and screaming mom from a tiny little baby field mouse with a cardboard box when she was 7. Mice really don't phase me all that much, but I don't want them in my house.

Bugs. Whole different story. Don't want bugs. Hate bugs. Bugs Bad.

So now I'm torn... do I start going through everything else in the pantry, knowing that that flour was surrounded by a couple of bags of sugar (and these things supposedly hate sugar), and has been back there for awhile, or do I just live on while being vigilant about checking everything I open in the pantry, never knowing when I'm going to run into one of those bugs. I mean I've not seen one since the pantry was all cleared of the bugs in 2004. Seriously.

The flour is an anomaly. Some of the bugs weren't moving... some were very active. And I read somewhere online that freezing them doesn't kill them because they're temperature tolerant. They're the super bug. This does not comfort me, considering that DH brought the flour into the freezer - of course, it's getting thrown away *outside* after a suitable amount of time in the freezer.

Can you tell I'm not happy about this? Of course you can. What you can't tell is that I've still got a very creepy crawly skin sensation going on and I'm brushing at my hands and neck constantly. My hair is my newest enemy because it's a little static-y today and if one strand just creeps a little stray because of air currents in the office, I jump out of my chair. Not good...

...and sometimes I don't like feeling like a girly-girl.