The Grossness Continues…

I know you’re all dying to know how I’m handling the moth situation at my house. So, I’ve decided to share some pics of the moth traps. Warning: this is not for the faint of heart. Honestly, I don’t know where the hell these moths have been hiding out. It was bad enough that I had at least a dozen moths flocking to the trap when I first put it out. BUT…it seems that they are literally multiplying over night. This is the trap after one week.

Gag!

Oh, but wait, that’s not all. They’re on the top of the trap, as well. Take a gander:

Double Gag

Gross, gross, gross (sorry, honey, now you’re never gonna want to step foot in my house, are you?). I put another trap out tonight because as I walked into the kitchen I had to flap my hands about my face so as not to get hit head on with the cloud of moths that were circling. My guess is that not ALL of the larvae were creeping and crawling around in the foodstuff but found another location to inhabit and they are now devoping into these moths that are swarming my kitchen at night. All of my cupboards are bare and all cereal/flour/rice/grain, etc is being stored in the fridge so I know they certainly don’t have any foodstuff to sustain them. I pulled this off a site on the interwebs:

When ready to pupate, larvae leave their tubes to spin a cocoon. They often migrate a considerable distance from their food source while searching for a pupation site, and are found on walls, countertops, and ceilings. This is especially true when infestations are heavy. There can be four to nine generations per year, depending on the food supply and house temperature.

Great. Fantasitc. I think I’m going to barf. This morning I am now taking the ShopVac to the ceilings, walls and any crevice I can find..and will suck those mofo’s out.

And since I’ve already grossed you out considerably, I thought I may as well share some more fun pics with you. Living with a child, two dogs and a cat can get pretty messy.

First, I shall start with the massive quantities of hair that come from the aforementioned animals (except for the cat, which I cannot catch and hold on to long enough to brush). Now, I love my dogs dearly but if I had THOUGHT about how much hair a Lab would put out, eek. I probably would have thought twice about getting one. They shed so badly that a daily vacuuming (sometimes two) are necessary. I brush the dogs every single day and this is what I get:

Umm, yeah. I was thinking that if I saved up enough fur I could maybe spin some yarn out of it and then knit a sweater. How cool would that be if I were to wear my own dogs’ coats. Bleck.

It looks like a small animal and sometimes Ridley is puzzled and thinks it’s some strange creature. Funny, you’d think he’d recognize the smell of his own fur. He’s obviously brilliant.

Ridley’s puzzlement even gets Gus interested

So, times that fur by 3 and that’s about how much I sweep from my floors each day. Would anyone like to volunteer to be my maid? I’ve been seriously thinking about investing in one of those new fangled Roombas. If anyone has had any experience with one…please let me know if it’s worth the investment, because I, sure as hell, am tired of busting my arse vacuuming multiple times a day.

On to the next adventure. Boy, you never know what you’ll get in my little world. The cat, who spends most of his days outside, likes to kill small creatures and drop them in the back yard. Usually he kills moles and mice. Ridley loves to go outside first thing in the morning and see what prize his cat-brother has left for him in the yard. He then puts it in his mouth and throws it around a few times until I decide I’ve seen enough mouse juggling and whisk it off into the bushes. Today the cat left a poor little finch for us.

Unbeknownst to me, Ridley grabbed the carcass first thing this morning and I didn’t see it until it was already IN the house and IN his crate. I couldn’t figure out why he was playing so contentedly in his crate. Upon further inspection I found the bird and promptly grabbed it, took it outside and took it’s photo. Poor mauled, dog-spit covered, dead creature.

There you have it…morose Monday. Oooo. I think I may have a new theme day. Woo hoo.

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Spaghetti with Worms, Anyone?

I never should have gotten up yesterday. It was a complete day-from-hell for me. I’m just now getting around to posting about it because I’ve been in such a pissy mood that I haven’t been able to sit still long enough to write. This is my story…

I haven’t made any baked goods since I sold my restaurant in February and my daughter has been begging me to make oatmeal cookies. So, I caved and we made cookies Monday evening. We had a few – right out of the oven, with milk, of course, and then I packaged up the rest and left them on the kitchen counter.

As I was getting out of the shower yesterday morning I could hear my daughter yelling – at the dogs. I hurried downstairs to find that they had gotten the cookies off the counter and had proceeded to ingest almost half of them. Great. So, needless to say, my day started out quite shitily. I angrily tossed the remaining dog-spit covered cookies into the garbage as my daughter looked on in horror.

The rest of the morning was fairly uneventful except for my daughter’s constant protests and whining about having to clean her room. We accomplished some cleaning and decided to stop for lunch. And then…

All hell broke loose. I decided to throw some spaghetti together for a quick lunch. I grabbed the box of spaghetti from the cupboard and as I dumped it into the boiling water I could see some strange and unexpected ‘things’ floating in the water. Oh.My.God. Upon further inspection the ‘things’ were found to be WORMS. Yes…nasty little larvae. I gagged, choked and screamed all at the same time (which sounded something like – “gahahggrrgglrlrfcoughholyfuckohmygodeeeekoooohnoooo”) and also did a squirmy heebie-jeebie dance because this is what I saw:

Except they were all shriveled and boiled and there were at least a dozen of them. Ugh. Now, I realize that to some these may be a delicacy. But, um…I’m not going there, thanks. I tossed a heaping mound of half cooked spaghetti and worms into the garbage along with the remaining uncooked pasta – and started investigating. To my horror I found MORE, yes more of the larvae in a sealed box of soy flour, in E’s crackers, in the pancake mix, in the cake mixes, in the dog biscuits; they were in just about everything in my cupboard that was grain/flour based.

We got on the computer and started researching and found that they were Pantry Moth larvae (also known as Indian Meal Moths). Super fun. I had actually noticed that we had more of a moth ‘problem’ this year than most years but the moths were tiny…not your average garden-variety moth that you occasionally see seeking out the nearest light source as evening approaches. Here is a photo of the nasty bugger:

I don’t typically have a problem with moths. What i do have a problem with is the fact that these monsters are laying eggs (apparently 100’s at a time) in the nooks and crannies of my cupboards and in boxed food. These eggs are hatching into larvae that are INFESTING my foodstuff. GAG, GAG, GAG. On one site we read that you are to place any unopened, packaged food that you suspect to be infested in the freezer and this will kill the larvae. Um, yeah. So…I’ll have DEAD larva in my food. Clever. I opted to not go that route and tossed everything into the garbage. Dammit. I was pissed.

I ordered pheromone traps to snag these nasty critters before they can reek any more havoc in my house. I got the traps in the mail today and immediately set them up in my cupboards. HA! I caught several moths right off the bat. Apparently, I didn’t wash my hands properly and still have some moth pheromone on me because as I type this I have two tiny moths dive bombing me. Gotcha suckas!

So, now I have to empty my cupboards, clean them thoroughly and caulk any and all cracks and crevices to prevent another ‘infestation’. I really dislike that word. Bet you’re all just dying to move in with me, aren’t you?

I was exhausted and pissy. I needed something sinfully delicious to calm my nerves. And seeing as I had to throw out just about every ounce of food in the house the only thing I had left was: marshmallows, a chocolate bar and some graham crackers. Ahhhhh…s’mores. I was too lazy to start a fire in the fire pit so here is how my day ended…with this:

and this:

Oh…and with a very nice, long nap. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

And as a quick aside…my dear fellow blogger and ever-so-talented artist, bronsonfive, over at Pictures of Doom has hosted his first ever “Contest of Doom” – featuring drawings submitted by fellow bloggers. Go on…go check it out…you won’t be disappointed. You can even see my latest artistic endeavor!

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Stop Bugging Me!

I’m sitting on my deck innocently trying to catch up on my blog reading when all of a sudden I feel something on my foot. I writhe a bit and let out my typical I-can’t-get-this-off-of-my-body-soon-enough squeal as I swat whatever creature has decided to land on me away. But…oh no…this thing doesn’t move. BECAUSE it’s a huge frickin’ insect that has apparently attached itself to my foot with its sticky clawed legs. Ugh. Most of you are not aware that I am plagued by Insectus Giganticus Syndrome. I blogged about it last year here.

Now, I can handle bugs – most bugs, that is. I’ve lived in apartments above bars/restaurants before and was accustomed to having cockroaches crawl about my body whilst drunkenly passed out on my futon…and was also accustomed to watching said insects scurry in swarms down my drain when I turned on the kitchen light. No big deal.

Here’s the problem. I live in New York…not Florida, not Arizona…not in a state that is commonly known for LARGE, mutant insects. If a bug is larger than my thumb then there’s a problem. It should be living in another state. Not here.

So, when I go to swat this insect off of my foot and feel its sticky, squishy body, I, of course, investigate. To my shock and horror it is some horrific, prehistoric looking thing. It plays dead as I remove it from my foot.

It’s just nasty, nasty…would you want that mofo clinging to your foot? I think not.

The dogs hear me freaking out so they come to investigate.

Ridley starts salivating immediately (you can see little specks of dog spit on the deck) because he loves bugs and thinks he’s about to have a meal.

I love this photo – he thinks if he looks at it out of the corner of his eye the bug won’t notice him.

The dogs LOVE bugs. Ridley has been known to play with cicadas for hours and hours…just watching them flutter and hiss and spin. Ick. Gus, he likes the big, nasty scarab beetles that somehow find their way into my house. He got one last week and I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why he was foaming at the mouth. My daughter yelled, “Oh no, he has rabies”. Um, no. Eventually, I found the culprit. Another fine black scarab specimen.

The first such scarab that we found in the house was captured, put in a jar and fondly named “Midnight”. My daughter insisted we keep him/her. I, of course, refused. We set it free in the back yard as she cried, “Goodbye, Midnight, I’ll miss you.” Goodbye is right. And don’t come back.

A few months later I stumbled upon an Oleander Hawk Moth. Now, the moth was not as bad. It was quite interesting and I even let the thing crawl around on my hand for a photo op.

THAT was a BIG frickin’ insect. Just look at the wing span!

And then there were the cicada killer wasps. *Gulp* I seriously thought that I had stepped into “Land of the Lost” when I walked into my kitchen one evening to find a wasp the size of a small bird swooping around the ceiling. My first instinct was to run like hell. But I was in my own home, where would I go?

Nope, that’s not my hand holding the nasty wasps…are you kidding? I will only go so far for the sake of a photo op…and holding giant wasps would be going too far for this damsel.

Now, I will say that I don’t really like to kill bees of any sort but the first time I encountered the cicada killer wasp I was so panicked that I grabbed a broom and a can of bug spray and shot the sucker out of the sky then beat it with a broom. I was literally shaking…and trying to figure out why my house had been selected for this mutant insect experiment conspiracy.

That was not the only cicada killer wasp incident. I still get them every so often. But at least now I know what they are so I stifle the scream and just deal with them.

The bug this evening was not that big compared to what I’ve witnessed in the past. It was just…nasty looking, plus it was crawling on my leg and it had no business doing that. Eeeewwww.

I let the pooches play with it – only because I wanted to get some interesting photos to share with you so you, too, can be creeped out. You’re welcome.

It didn’t flutter, didn’t hiss, didn’t flop about. It just played dead so they lost interest and I took a stick and swatted it into the yard. Ick. No more big bugs, please. I’d be very happy if I didn’t see another insectus giganticus this year.

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Mothra

For those of you who don’t know me, I must first explain that for some reason I am plagued by a strange phenomena involving extremely large insects. I generally do not have a problem with your garden variety insect, but these creatures that have crossed my path as of late are the kind that send the creepy crawly how-can-something-this-big-actually-exist shivers down my spine. First it was the giant scarab beetle fluttering around the fireplace and then it was the Oleander Hawk Moth (or so my research has led me to believe) that I almost stepped on during one of my morning walks.

I did gather up enough courage to place the creature on my hand and take a photo so everyone could share in this experience. Mind you, I was not fond of feeling its prickly legs grabbing on to my skin for dear life, but it was a very lovely specimen.

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