Last time we checked in with La Porte jack-of-all-junk Butch Forest (see "J-U-N-K in the Y2K," December 30, 1999), the conversation revolved around a complicated four-way horse trade involving a gutted 18-foot Airstream trailer in Manvel, a 14-foot fiberglass bass boat in Houston, a Hi-Lo camper in Dickinson and a canoe described in full by Forest as "green." That proposed transaction is still pending, but before Forest hung up the phone, he wanted to know if we had survived the Y2K scare unscathed. We had. The several hundred dented cans of food he'd given us as a preventative Christmas present still constitute the bulk of our kitchen decor -- but that, of course, was not the point of the question. For if the rest of the world watched the calendar change without a hitch, Butch Forest -- ever the contrarian -- had taken a hit, and because he is even more storyteller than contrarian, he wanted to tell us about it. Seems Y2K came and went without incident in La Porte as elsewhere, leaving Forest with a mobile home full of stockpiled canned goods and, more to the point, boxes upon boxes of crackers and cereal and pasta and other grain-based foodstuffs. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, neighborhood mice discovered Forest's stash, and so Forest purchased himself a pile of rodent poison to staunch that budding plague. Only it turned out that the corn-based poison he purchased to kill the mice was itself riddled with weevils, which quickly outclassed the rodents as the infestation du jour. Yes, Forest said, the Y2K bug sure bit him. Who knew it would be a weevil?
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