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Infestations, We've Had a Few

The downside of cooling off in the summer.

This was a rather unsettling weekend at our house.  Not unsettling in a major way, but unsettling in a small way, like so many home irritants tend to be.

If I think about it, I’d have to say it started on Thursday evening. (It actually started weeks earlier, but I am getting ahead of myself.) The kids and I cooled off that evening at our favorite watering hole: the Underwood Pool. If you recall, it was a hot day in the middle of an oppressively hot week. We came home from the pool, hung our towels out on the porch, had a snack, and noticed there was a fly or two buzzing around the house. No big deal. Occasionally, flies will find a way inside, right? Perhaps they too wanted to escape the brutal humidity.

Friday night arrived, and we again head off to the pool for a cooling dip. When we settled in later that evening, there were now four or five flies buzzing around the house. I was beginning to think this was strange, as the house had been sealed up tight as a drum as a result of two window air conditioners running off and on all week. So, where were the flies coming from? And why so many?

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Kevin (who was on his way out for the evening, thus leaving me home with the kids and the flies), suggested the flies were coming in through the air conditioners. This made no sense as we’ve had the same two AC units for years, and have never had so many flies buzzing around the house.  But it was the second hottest day in recorded history, so ... maybe.

I put a movie in for the kids (School of Rock) and hid in my room with a book (Nora Ephron’s latest publication of essays). When the movie ended, I asked the kids if they enjoyed it. They had, all except for the flies buzzing around the TV screen.

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“Did you swat any?” I inquired.

“They fly too fast!” I was told. Plus the movie was on.

By Saturday morning, I began to feel as if I was in an Alfred Hitchcock film. There were at least ten flies now. This is a lot of flies for a 1,200 square-foot house that five people already call home.

Kevin ended up sleeping on the couch that night as his spot in the bed got usurped by the girls, who were understandably freaked out by all the flies. When I asked him how he slept, he replied (and I quote):  “OK, except, there were flies buzzing around my head all night”.

That’s it, I thought, the flies have to go and we have to figure out where they are coming from.

Now, I’ve had very little success eradicating pestilence. The ants (both big and small) seem to come and go as they please whether I put poison down or not. Same for the mice. In fact, the mice are clever.  They often eat the peanut butter right off the trap and live to tell the tale. The moths last fall were a challenge, but I managed to throw out every possible food item that they were attracted to, and eventually, they dematerialized.

The question of how to kill the flies remained. The girls decided to set fly traps with double sticky tape and sugar. Benjy perfected a clapping method. I folded a magazine and started swatting away, while Kevin played the Boggle equivalent on the iPad. Occasionally Benjy and I managed to kill one or two. But there were always more.

Eventually, Kevin investigated the basement, where a smell of decay had been building all week. He located a mouse trap he’d set months ago. We had been so used to never actually catching a mouse, that we completely forgot about the trap. Much to everyone’s surprise and dismay, it now held a badly decaying mouse: of course, the source of the flies.

Ugh. The mouse corpse was quickly disposed of, and the girls had the archetypal pleasure of squealing with disgust as the worm-ridden furry corpse was unceremoniously put into the kitchen trash bag, and finally brought outside and placed in the trash receptacle there. But still ahead of us lay the unpleasant and challenging task of eradicating the remaining flies.

And this, dear readers, is how I spent my weekend. I expect yours was more pleasurable!

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