The Joys of Home Ownership

A few weeks ago I realized I had a number of tenants (pests, vagrants, fellow travelers, call them what you will) that hadn't been invited in. Or at least I suspected I had them.

It started when I heard an odd sound when I was up in one of my second story bedrooms. Now I don't go up there often, frequently not for several weeks at a time, so I'm not aware of changes in atmosphere up there. Other than it's freaking hot up there in summer! Anyway, the sound was coming from the ceiling, near an air vent, not far from my front window. It was an odd sound, like a lot of small folk digging or scraping. When I went up into the attic (beyond freaking hot) I saw some evidence that at some point in time a bird had spent time in my abode. Wonderful. But nothing to explain the sounds. I concluded it was bugs and took measures to "make their day" as good ole Clint would say.

Apparently I was too late because a few days later a small hole appeared in my ceiling. I just happened to be looking in on things soon after the break out had occured--it was indeed bugs of the flying sort. I shut the door and put a towel at the bottom to contain things and just left them up there to get pissed off and die. I'd covered up the air vents earlier as a precaution so with the door blocked I had no worries about them getting into the rest of the house.

So now I have lots of little dead bug corpses and some stains on the window shades. I'm not sure if they had stingers and were trying to kill the shades or maybe it was bug-juice from them head butting the windows in an attempt to win free of my house. In any case it didn't work and there are dead bugs everywhere up there! Time to vacuum, I 'spose.





















Comments

Anonymous said…
On the bright side: those aren't termites.

So you are a bugicidal maniac? I will keep that in mind next time critters invade my space.
9:25 PM
utenzi said…
Always willing to help fellow bloggers, Queen Sass.
11:31 PM
Anonymous said…
Ew YUCKY!! I'd have run out of the house in a screaming fit.
8:06 PM
utenzi said…
There were several thousand of them up there so if they'd gotten into the general area of the house they might have killed someone. Me, I guess. Bad thought! But that's why I made sure they couldn't get out of that one room. Now I just have to spray the attic in case anything is left up there and then fix the ceiling.
8:44 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nitroflex at home

Image
I mentioned a few days ago that I'd purchased off of Craig's List an exercise machine. A Nitroflex, to be more specific, for the grand sum of $75. The boxes you see to the left were bought by the seller as discontinued merchandise over a year ago and stored in his back yard storage shed. You might be able to see some of the bugs and such that had made their homes on these boxes. I left them out on my deck for a few days before opening them to allow the insects to leave gracefully or die in the sun. The picture to the left is the pieces from the box, unboxed, and up in one of my upstairs bedrooms. For the most part it wasn't difficult to move it around though two pieces were heavy and a number of them were kinda long and bulky to be wandering about the house with. Surprisingly, this kit didn't require any extra tools. There were two allen keys and one combo wrench included in the boxes and that was all it took to put it together. The whole thing only took about half an h
Read more

flea!

Image
Yep, that's one of those damn blood suckers. Renee's revenge on my neglecting her feelings, no doubt. We guys just have it so tough! LOL This here is a picture of my ankle and while it's not very obvious, I guess, there's a bunch of flea bites on there. Itches a bit, dammit. The annoying part is that the damn fleas can't use my blood--fleas are mostly species specific and don't have the proper enzymes to make meals out of blood from other critters--so they're not getting anything out of biting me. It's just frustration and starvation driving their biting. Well, I guess the real annoying part is the bites themselves, but I wanted to seem a little sensitive there for a moment. But no more of that. Kill the fleas! While most of the bites are on my ankles and calves, there's an occasional bite up higher like these 4 on my thigh. They're kinda hard to see through the hair but I wasn't able to focus on the skin with all the hair in the way. Sorry.
Read more

ankles: the sequel

Image
I've heard rumors that one post about my sprained ankle wasn't enough so here's more pictures to satisfy a public hungry for swollen flesh... This was taken the morning after I sprained the ankle. There's starting to be a black and blue mark from the blood vessels leaking At this point the swelling is still very localized to the lateral side of the left ankle and presumably that's the tendon that was affected (very likely since I really screwed it up 15 years ago and it's got extra play in it) In this picture, taken on Sunday evening about 25 hours after the injury, you can see the edema, or swelling, has spread out over the top and entire lateral side of the foot. There's also more evidence of hematoma at the skin above the metatarsals. At the same time, there's still significant swelling at the original site to the point that it totally eclipses the left ankle. Here's a lateral view taken at the same time as the photo above to show the hematoma bet
Read more