Happy Birthday!

Today is my hubby's birthday. Hubby's a man of many names. He's Silly Acronym Man, the one I turn to when I need a silly acronym for one of my books but am coming up empty. He's Captain Puntastic, keeper of a veritable library of ridiculous puns. And he's just plain Studly. I'll let that one speak for itself. But my favorite nickname of his is Slayer of Bees, which can be abbreviated as Slayer to sound really intimidating or as SOB if you want to tease him. So in honor of his birthday, I'm going to tell my most favorite story in the world: how hubby got his name.

So here's the setup: We were camping with a bunch of our friends, and that morning we decided to go on a hike through this absolutely gorgeous gorge. (Heh. Gorgeous gorge. Sometimes I make myself giggle.) There were two paths running along the length of the gorge: one at the top and one at the bottom. Our group split up; I was in the middle of the top group and hubby-to-be was somewhere at the bottom.

If hubby were here right now, he would insist that I also tell you that I'd had the gall to break up with him before the trip, so we weren't even dating at the time, which makes what he did in the subsequent paragraphs even more cool. So now I've told you that.

So we're walking, which is generally what you do when you go on a hike, and that's when things got weird. Because at one point I looked down, and I was covered in bees. Quite literally covered. There were no bees on the person in front of me. None on the person behind me. Just me.

Freaky.

Anyone who doubts that telepathy exists needs to get stuck in a swarm of bees sometime. Because those suckers quite literally all started stinging me at once, and I didn't do anything to set them off. They were in my hair. One was stuck in my ear. They were up my shirt, crawling on my belly. They were crawling over my mouth.

But luckily, I am a strong woman. I am not afraid of bugs. I am calm and cool under pressure. So I squinched my eyes shut, threw up my hands, and ran along the edge of the gorge screaming my fool head off: "Bees! Bees! Bees!"

Hubby-to-be was like Spiderman. He ran up the side of the gorge, which was a good two or three stories high and a sheer rock face. He stopped me from imminent splattage on the rocks, whipped off his shirt (which was nice), and started whacking the bees off of me. They immediately turned on him, because he was messing with his lunch.

That would be me, of course.

Now, you may already know this, but dead bees release a hormone (I think) that attracts other bees to protect the hive. So the problem kept getting worse and worse; we were in the middle of a swarm, and he grabbed me and pushed me along the trail: "RUN!"

So we all ran from the bees and ended up in a little clearing in the forest, huddled into a group, whispering like the bees might hear us: "Do you think they followed us?" Which seems funny except that they did, and so we did it all over again with the screaming and the swatting and the running, and we eventually ended up in the middle of a blacktop parking lot, which was a good 100 degrees in the heat. If any of those buggers tried to chase us, they would have been toast.

And then hubby-to-be bought me a SnoCone for being "brave." He even remembered my favorite flavor: blue raspberry.

We got back together a couple of weeks later. Because really, how could I not?

And that's the story of Slayer of Bees, my own personal hero. Happy birthday, Slayer. I love you!