When I was a young lad in my late teens, I was tasked with scraping the eaves of my parents house in order to prep them for a fresh coat of paint. I laid a ladder against the side of the house and began working my way down the eaves. Due to the height and angle of the ladder, my head and shoulders were actually above the eaves, forcing me to work the scraper sight unseen along the wooden underside of the eaves. This was no big deal, however, as I hardly cared about the quality of my work - this being a parentally-induced uncompensated chore, and not my own house. That is, until I hit a patch of old leaves that were lodged up under the eaves.

The impossibility of running into a patch of leaves did not occur to me at first, even though they would have been defying the laws of gravity. As there were no tall trees within 100 yards of the house, the laws of space and time would have been similarly violated. The papery substance turned out to be a mid-sized wasp's nest, and the "leaves" that fell upon my forearm were actually the inhabitants of that nest. They were none too happy, and in a fraction of a second I realized the severity of my situation. The next part of this story is best told from my father's point of view...

My father heard an ungodly yowling shriek that was undeniably me, and then heard the ladder crash into the driveway. He ran outside and around the corner, fearing the worst, only to find the ladder lying on the ground in a manner implicative of my probable demise... and absolutely no sign of me whatsoever. It was as if I had vanished from the Earth! He bewilderedly followed the perimeter of the house around to the back yard only to find me nowhere in sight there either. After much frantic searching, he finally located me in the kitchen. I was sitting on the floor, nursing my wounds.

I had miraculously only been stung/bitten five times (two under the shirt, although I'll never know how). I had achieved this feat only by leaping backwards off of the ladder from at least 10 feet up, while emitting my aforementioned yowl. Landing impossibly onto my feet with zero bone breakage, I took off at a dead run in the horizontal direction of my falling momentum - which turned out to be straight for the kitchen back door. I was out of the driveway before the ladder had even finished it's fall. I slammed the door behind me, and swung around to look out the window upon my assailants - two of the wasps had indeed followed me and were buzzing angrily on the back patio, looking for revenge. They quickly dissipated. I had avoided the full wrath of the swarm by only the narrowest of margins.

Motherfucking wasps.