Invasion! - August 23, 2020

 

If it ain't one thing, it's another.

The Husband, who worked from home this week, called me Friday to ask if we had "any more of that stinky cheese."  He was talking about feta cheese, which we've discovered is like crack to mice.  He said he thought he'd seen something move in the kitchen and wanted to set a trap.  

In the 35 years that we've lived in this house, we've seen TWO mice inside the house, both sightings in the last 3 years or so.  But we've caught several mice on the back porch, and it was conceivable that one might have come in from the porch if the kitchen door had been left open for a while.  I had come home from work one day last week and found the kitchen door open, with just the screen door closed.  The screen door doesn't fit perfectly, and though we've added metal strips and threshold barriers, there's still a little space where critters could get in if they were determined.  A mouse could've come in.  Or a lizard.

The Husband set two traps, one on each side of the refrigerator, where he thought he'd seen the mouse.  He baited them with Extra Sharp Vermont Cheddar.  Over the weekend, he moved the remaining sticky trap from the porch settee into the kitchen, and put a little chunk of cheddar in the center of the trap.

Yesterday, as I was moving back and forth between the sewing room and the porch, I saw a lizard stuck to the sticky trap.  The two mouse traps by the refrigerator remain un-sprung.

I worked on embroidery designs all day yesterday, from just after dawn until bedtime.  About 9:30 last night, I decided to give it up and go to bed to read for a while.  As I was puttering around, plugging in my laptop and my phone, I thought I saw something fly past me.  I froze for a minute, watching and listening, but didn't see/hear anything - maybe it was a "floater" - so I went on to the bedroom.  While turning down the bed, I heard an insect - a BIG one, from the sound of it - zoom by my ear.  I went to the kitchen for the fly-swatter and handed it to The Husband on the way back through the living room.  "There's a horsefly in the bedroom."  

Offing horseflies and wasps is his job.  

He followed me to the bedroom, fly-swatter ready.  

There was what appeared to be a teenage horsefly on the ceiling above the television cabinet.  He approached it, and swatted it, and we heard it hit the wall behind the TV cabinet.  Relieved that the problem was solved, I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. The Husband and I were congratulating ourselves on having dispatched the fly so quickly, and we joked about how awful it would have been if we'd gone to bed and slept with our mouths open and the fly had crawled around inside our mouths, and while I was standing at the mirror, about to brush my teeth, something else zoomed by my head.  I said, "Oh, my god!  It's not dead!"  

And The Husband, who was then peering behind the TV cabinet, said, "Yes, it is.  I'm looking at it."

I said, 'IT JUST FLEW BY MY HEAD!"

As he came into the bathroom, it zoomed past HIS head.  He did a little jujitsu move with the fly-swatter and missed.  I rushed past him to close the door so that we could trap it.  It landed on the wall, and he smacked it.  It wasn't a horsefly - just a big old hairy fly.  

Two seconds after he killed it, another one zoomed by.

To make a long story short (too late?), we killed at least 10 flies in and around the bedroom.  No clue where they came from.

I hated to go to bed after that.  The fly-in-your-mouth joke wasn't so funny anymore.

I closed the bedroom door, opened the bathroom door, and left the light on in the bathroom, thinking to draw any remaining flies to the light, and killed two more in the bathroom before I went to sleep.

The Husband said he killed two more in the bedroom this morning.

I googled "big hairy fly."  Turns out, they're cluster flies, and they can nest in your walls and attics and come out in swarms.  Tough to exterminate unless you're willing to soak your house in pesticide.  (We're not - not for this problem.)  

The Husband came up with the idea to hang another Tarfoot ball in the attic.  

The lizard is still stuck on the trap in the kitchen.  I think The Husband hopes to add a mouse to the collection.