I hesitate to tell you this because you won’t want to come visit me, but we’re infested with stink bugs for probably the third straight year. We can’t get rid of them. The exterminators offer us no hope. And the problem is just getting worse. These bugs smell horrible. If you squish them or scare them they secrete a nasty odor that hovers in the air for several minutes. They like heat, and when the weather is warm they not only come out in droves but they actually start flying. They also die in prodigious numbers, leaving corpses everywhere. Vacuuming them helps, but then running the vacuum creates an Eau de Stink Bug aroma. The only good thing about them is that they don’t act like cockroaches and get into your food. The linked article says that they can decimate crops, but they tend not to bother with invading the pantry.
I’m sure at some point Finn has sampled these bugs, although I never witnessed it. He does seem to have the good sense to avoid them and not treat them as snacks. But they’re everywhere, both dead and alive. On the worst days, I have vacuumed hundreds of them off windows, shelves, the floor, grooves in the floor, laundry, curtains, screen doors, the bathroom, everywhere.
They have no natural predator and no one seems to know how to disrupt their reproductive cycle.
I hate them. I hate them, but I have definitely adjusted to them better than anyone else in our family. I no longer freak out when they land on me. Whoever figures out how to eradicate these things is going to be a billionaire, and probably win a Nobel Prize, too.