on with the bugs!

It's been a bad week for bugs.

After all these infestation type entries, where I've revealed that I've had problems with fleas, ants, and now fruit flies (not including all the spiders that I haven't even mentioned), I'm afraid that you will all think that I am a slob. In all honesty, I'm beginning to suspect it myself. I'd keep these things to myself if they didn't make such good stories. So, on with the bugs!

First off, the wasp. I came home this evening to find a wasp in my pants. (Not a W.A.S.P., mind you, or that would be an entirely different kind of entry.) I was climbing the steps to my apartment when I felt myself being stung in the leg. And then again. And again. I started to panic, because my arms were full of all this stuff, because I hate to make two trips from the car. And so I started to put things down, with the intention of taking off my pants to get the stinging insect out. And then I actually said to myself, "No, no, go inside the house first." So I unlocked the door, hopping and screaming, threw everything down, and yanked my pants down to the ankles. The wasp flew out and met my screen door. Seeing he was trapped, I decided to take inventory of my injuries before I killed him as dead as I could possibly get him.

Five stings. And I grew up thinking that once a wasp stings you, it dies, that bees and such only get one poke before they go to the great garden in the sky. I have been sorely misled.

And then on to the major story: Fruit flies. While the wasp story was not a matter of infestation (though even one wasp is more than you should ever have in your pants), the fruit fly story is.

I noticed that I had a few fruit flies a week or so ago. My dealings with these tiny insects was pretty much limited to a biology project in the twelfth grade. I bred them in a little tube to learn about genetics or bugs or ether or something. What I should have learned is that the stupid things basically only live to procreate, and they don't waste any time doing it.

And so where I had half a dozen fruit flies, I suddenly had half a million. All around the trash, all around the sink, all around my bowl of oranges, just everywhere. Some of them even migrated to my bedroom, where they sit on the mirror all day long. Apparently, fruit flies are quite vain.

I know the best way to get rid of fruit flies is just to clean, but I wanted something more barbaric to make me feel like I was really combatting them, not just making things sparkle. So I did some online research and found a recipe for what I like to call the Fruit Fly Death Pool. It's basically water, sugar, vinegar, and dish soap. I put out a jar of the stuff one night and woke up to see that it had a new ingredient: tiny floating bodies. So then I made four more containers of it to put at strategic positions around the kitchen. It looks like I've just got jars of coffee everywhere, because the only vinegar I had was balsamic. I periodically squint at the little jars to see the body count, and then I laugh.

And I cleaned too. The sink, the drain, the trash can, the counter, the bedroom mirror. The numbers are decreasing, hopefully more rapidly than the remaining ones are laying eggs. A winged cloud no longer rises from my kitchen surfaces every time I move, and that itchy, crawly feeling on my skin is subsiding. I can only hope that this is the end of the fruit fly story, and I don't even want to think about what infestation could possibly be next.

I hope it's puppies.