The Earwig Horror

This is a cut-and-paste of an email I received from my sister:

I have one of those indoor / outdoor thermometers like I sent to 
you.  My outdoor transmitter was hanging in a tree just outside the 
dining room window and had been out there for a year and working fine 
until Friday, when we noticed we weren't getting a signal from 
it.  We thought it was probably the battery and finally, yesterday 
morning around 7:15 while the kids were eating breakfast, I brought 
it into the kitchen to change the battery.  I couldn't get the 
battery cover off at first, probably, I thought, because there was 
some dirt in the crack around the cover and it was jammed.  So I used 
a knife to go around the cover and tried again.  When the cover came 
off a bunch of earwigs fell out of the transmitter onto my kitchen 
counter.  I yelled and smashed around at them until I had killed all 
of them (8 earwigs, as it turned out), then two more crawled out.  I 
killed them too, then took the battery out.  I could see antennae 
poking through into the battery area from the inside of the 
transmitter, then two more crawled out of that hole.  I killed them, 
then watched for a minute or two and no more came out, so I picked 
the transmitter up and walked across the kitchen, got a battery from 
the closet, put it in, and three more earwigs crawled out onto my 
hands.  I screamed that time and threw the transmitter down (narrowly 
missing the cats' water dish), shook the earwigs off of me and 
stomped them.  By this time I had the attention of both kids and both 
cats, so I had to explain what was happening.  While I was 
explaining, another earwig crawled out of the transmitter - that 
makes 16 earwigs so far, if you've lost count.  I killed that one 
and, as Steve came in the back door, having missed the whole thing, I 
was sealing the transmitter in a ziplock bag so that I could throw it 
away.  I had him take it all the way to the outdoor trash can because 
I figured that if earwigs could get inside that transmitter they 
could probably get out of a sealed zip lock bag.  I spent the rest of 
the morning shuddering every time I would think about the bugs - I 
don't mind bugs outside, but I was pretty creeped out to have them 
boiling out into my kitchen.  By the time the bus came at 7:30 Kyle 
was referring to the whole incident as "The Earwig Horror."
 

 "The Earwig Horror"...H.P. Lovecraft would be proud.

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