Summer calls for salad and “getting healthy”. After all, it’s not pretty after you chow down on pasta and pass out from a carb coma…

Just sayin’.

The only negative to salad and a new health kick is that apparently our neighborhood flies are on the band wagon too. Every time I open the back door to fire up our Weber, one of them takes it as an open invitation to come in and fondle our leaf lettuce. Last week I even saw one land on the remote. I think he was trying to press “rewind” for the P90X toll-free number. Don’t feel sorry for him. He wouldn’t have made it past week 3. Yup, my “Mr. Miyagi” karate chop, not only ended any chance of him bulking up, but pretty much did him in.

The fact is, I’ve been snapping cloth napkins like a frat boy in the men’s locker room, and I’m tired of hurdling the sofa without the benefits of an Olympic gold medal. iPhone has an app for everything, and apparently it’s true, however a friend suggested I get the Electronic Flyswatter. On the surface it looks like a toddler’s plastic tennis racket but she said it’s the best two AA batteries will ever get me. Then there’s the deluxe version. It uses 2 “D” batteries and boasts 1500 volts of sheer excitement…for me, not the fly. I’m considering the possibilities.

Some might say that swatting at the fly is good exercise and that staying fit and trim is simply a case of Karma gone wrong. If you ever saw my batting skills back in the days of Junior High softball… well, let’s just say, “Chalk up 3 for ‘Shoo Fly’…”

Look, if I had compound eyes I’d be ahead too. No, lucky me, I have floaters…and coke bottle glasses. Oh wait, with this year’s glasses I checked off the box for “lighter lenses”… so, diet coke bottle glasses. If I were a fly and I saw a woman flailing a cloth napkin, like a pirate clinging to a slice of driftwood in shark-infested waters (especially in “surround”) I, too, would swoop and scoop before she realized she was missing her strawberry seed off of her radicchio and frisee…

Radiccio

Frisee

(Just in case you were wondering).

Look, I’m not asking for a handout. I’m simply asking for a Mulligan every other swing. That and the promise that there isn’t a troupe of “fly guys” sitting on the sidelines, eating stale popcorn and laughing at my misfortune…because yesterday I looked out, and there were two flies clinging to the outside breakfast nook window. Seriously, they were just hanging out…like our window bordered the county’s dump site. Jeff said that they were chatting about how “they JUST saw Walter flying around less than 20 minutes ago, but now he was no where to be found”… I said they were ROWL (Rolling on the Window Laughing) at my housefly swatting skills. So much so that I think one of them fell off and the other had to call “Life Alert.”

Tomorrow I am going to look into options. Madison said I needed a “bug zapper”. I asked her what that was and she explained that she didn’t know but she saw it on television, and that is what I needed. I immediately ran and told Jeff that I needed a Roomba (and tried to use Madison’s reasoning), but somehow it didn’t quite go over the same way. Oh how I long to be 5 again…