We've all had it happen-- the dread pixie infestation! Not only do they tease cats, wake up babies, and whiz around your ears yelling "Hey, listen!", but that blasted pixie dust gets into everything. In no time at all, your vacuum cleaner is flying around the room by itself, hunting for Neverland.

Once the convention closed down, most of the beasts wandered off again. Pixies, however, invaded the local houses. Before we knew it, our entire town was ravaged with them. Exterminators had a field day, with specials on "pixie-free environments with quarterly monitoring' . Personally, I don't like exterminating things that look as human as pixies do, so I turned my research endeavors to this subject immediately.

First, some simple prevention measures:

If you're in the habit of leaving out bowls of food or saucers of milk for your pets, stop it immediately. Pixies  take such demonstrations as welcome mats, and immediately contact their friends via pixie-net to join them in swarming your house.

Place objects made of iron outside your house at each corner. Iron skillets are best. If they don't succeed in repelling pixie attack, at least they make a convincing pixie-swatter. Visit the nearest Goodwill or thrift store for real bargains, thus assisting others in a charitable endeavor as well as deflecting pixies. Of course, an old iron pot can serve double duty as a planter. 

It is possible to confuse pixies by wearing your clothes inside out. However, though children (such as mine) greet such a stricture with glee, it's more difficult for the husband or wife who customarily dresses in business attire, necessitating stops at nearby gas stations to change clothing. One poor neighbor of ours was thrown out of a gas station on suspicion of being an escapee from the local mental hospital. Fortunately, his wife was able to bail him out on the vagrancy charge for a nominal sum.

Although these tried-and-true measures are helpful in the early stages, a sizeable number of pixies are immune to traditional methodology. This results in the dreaded Zapping Pixie, illustrated at right, which randomly transforms children into other creatures. While cats, dogs, and monkeys weren't a big problem, the llama was very hard on the carpet, and as for the insect life--well, the very notion of a flyswatter was terrifying.

I'll admit right off the bat that flooding the house with sleeping gas was not a good idea. While the pixies fell asleep on schedule, so did we. Also, our house is not airtight, so traces of the sleeping gas crept out, affecting drivers of cars on the road next to us. The resulting pandemonium necessitated a quick call to our insurance agent, which in turn imparted another valuable lesson: Always Keep Your Liability Insurance Up-to-date!

Setting off the fire sprinklers in the house did slow down the pixies somewhat as they grew too heavy to fly. My husband, however, was so incensed by the damage to the carpet that we got completely sidetracked, and forgot to catch them.

A bright young fellow at UC-Boulder in Colorado suggested a simpler approach. Open a door, and yell loudly "There goes Peter Pan!" While I give him points for ingenuity, our pixies appeared inured to this approach.

FINALLY, we discovered the ultimate solution, at last. PIXIES HIBERNATE! We put on our parkas and cranked up the air conditioner to maximum blast. Within three hours, the house was silent, the carpet coated with sleeping pixies. We hunted through the house for our erstwhile guests--a task reminiscent of combing a mountain of hair for lice--and boxed them up. After a solemn family council, we mailed them to Washington, D. C. on the premise that a few dozen more added to their extensive population could do no harm. After all, it's not as though anything important actually happens there.