Coffee heat rising

insecticides

Crickets and Bug Spray, Oh My!

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Spent half the morning paying some more dumb tax. 🙄 Last night not one but two amorous gentleman crickets took up residence in the family room, where they filled the night air with serenades to every lady cricket within miles. At night, when it’s quiet and still, these elegant little bugs sound less cheery than they do in the daytime and more, well…like they’re screaming.

Even with the bedroom door shut, way down at the other end of the house, their shrill fiddling kept me awake. Wide awake.

Interestingly, they can sense you approaching, even if you sneak up on them quiet as a stalking cat. As soon as you get close enough to maybe spot where they’re hiding, they clam up. So I couldn’t find them…were they in the fireplace? in the cracks around the Arcadia door? in the plant pots? They were impossible to find.

Finally I gave up, tromped out to the garage, and grabbed a can of bug spray.

I hate bug spray. I hate the stink of the stuff, hate the way it makes my stomach upset, hate having it anywhere near the dog, hate using it near the bug-eating geckos around the yard, and especially hate using it inside the house. But the hour was growing later and later, I wasn’t getting any sleep, and I couldn’t see any other way to shut the critters up. So I tried to restrain  myself, spraying it only where I thought they probably were ensconced.

Even a little of a bad thing is too much of a bad thing. What a stench!

The dog and I raced to the bedroom and slammed the door, hoping to keep the fumes out. This worked marginally. We were trapped, but at least we weren’t gagging in there. And the noise quieted down enough for me to get to sleep.

Come this morning, though…ugh! The front part of the house still stank to high heaven.

So, by dawn’s early light I was throwing open all the windows and doors, turning the fans to “tornado,” and scrubbing the floor on hands and knees. Scrubbed the floor twice with Simple Green and vinegar but still didn’t get all the stinky stuff up.

The smell still lingers, to some degree. It’ll be a day or two, I suppose, before it’s no longer noticeable to the human schnozz. Who knows how long a dog can smell it?

So annoying. I wish there was a better way to do in a noisy cricket. If you can’t catch it, swat it, or vacuum it, you’re kinda stuck with applying noxious chemicals.

One site I found said diatomaceous earth will kill the little guys. The pool filter uses that stuff. I’m less than thrilled about getting it around the dog—it’s irritating to the nose and dangerous if you breathe it into your lungs. And it’s really messy…sprinkling it around the house seems kinda counterproductive.

Here’s some folksy-sounding advice: pour a little pile of cornmeal in the middle of a glue board, the type you use to catch mice and rats. Comes from the University of Nebraska, so who am I to argue? Still, it takes a couple of days. What does one do for sleep while waiting for the cricket to stroll onto the glue board?

For that matter, Rattie wasn’t fooled by glue boards. Is there a reason to expect a cricket is any less wiley than a roof rat?

Anybody got any better ideas?

Image: Gryllus assimilis (common black cricket), from Robert E. Snodgrass,
Insects: Their Ways and Means of Living. New York: Smithsonian Institution, 1930. Public domain.

Only a slightly nightmarish day…

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Over at A Gai Shan Life, proprietor Revanche features a very beautiful chicken soup, comfort food she cooked up after an extraordinarily rough week.  Meanwhile, Frugal Scholar, feeling a little anxious after links to her site in Funny’s recently gone-viral post pulled traffic upward there, too, also covets comfort food, in her case a lush-sounding broccoli soup with an egg-parmesan swirl-in…glorioski!

Cassie and I could use a little comfort food ourselves, and as a matter of fact we have some chicken that I could cook up into a lovely soup. What a wacky day!

I’m sitting here in the counting house along about 2:30 this afternoon, trying to figure out how to finesse payment for the mountain of clothes I bought this week, when all of a sudden I smell…mothballs. Really, really strong stink of mothballs.

Mothballs? What? That would be 1,4-dichlorobenzene these days, a slightly less toxic product than the stuff that used to grace this common household insecticide, naphthalene, replaced because of its flammability. The newer ingredient is known to be carcinogenic, and god only knows what it does to 25-pound dogs.

No mothballs reside in my house, and the strong stench is fast getting stronger. I get up to see what the heck, wondering if there’s some sort of fire in the attic or something that’s releasing fumes. The closer I get to the center of the house, the stronger the stink is.

I’ve left all front, side, and back doors open because it’s a spectacular day and, after the recent cool snap, probably the last comfortable day before summer sets in. Outdoors I either can’t smell it or the odor is much fainter than inside the house, where the fumes are so strong they make my eyes water.

Leash up the dog and get outside. It occurs to me that maybe the workmen at Biker Boob’s former abode are using some sort of chemicals, so I go over and ask—nope, they’re not doing anything with any chemicals, not even Dap or paint. Walk back toward the alley behind the house, where the stench is now very powerful. I again wonder if it’s originating inside my house.

The young mom across the street is hauling soccer balls out of her SUV. She also smells the odor and wonders what it is. After some speculation, we decide to call the fire department.

Fire dudes show up in due course. They explore the alley. At first they think it’s coming from the big garbage bin between my house and Sally’s–possibly illegal dumping. Proceeding up the alley, they find oily stuff on the ground. Now they’re thinking maybe it’s dioxin. (Firemen must love these little adventures!) 🙄

By now Sally has come out, and Manny across the street from her has joined the party. Fire dudes ask Sally if she’s sprayed or used any chemicals. She says not. But the guy two houses up the street is installing a swimming pool…could there be any industrial chemicals involved in that?

The firemen proceed up the road and interrogate the suspect homeowner.

Turns out this moron has sprayed Ortho’s Groundclear all over his entire backyard and up and down the alley! He claims he’s mixed it according to the package instructions, but it seems highly unlikely that applying it according to the instructions would fill a distant neighbor’s home with choking fumes and stink up the air for four city lots in all directions. Though this stuff is supposed to be relatively benign, IMHO nothing that smells that foul can be good for you.

So I load the dog into the car and drive down to M’hijito’s house. Takes an hour for the nasty aftertaste to clear out of the throat and nose. Ugh!

We leave the dog in his house and make a Costco run. Now that I’ve decided to go back on Atkins to pare down about 10 pounds, I need a lot of lettuce and other low-carb veggies, plus a ton of meat. And meat for Cassie the Corgi. This occupies a couple of hours. We loaf around for a while. When it becomes clear that M’hijito wishes to go hang out with his friends, Cassie and I return to the war zone. By now the fumes have died down. A steady wind is blowing away from the house and has probably dried the oily liquid this clown has dumped all over a quarter-acre and 100 feet of alleyway.

Moving on: now it’s almost 7:00 p.m. I’m hungry; Cassie has no food prepared and neither do I. The bookkeeping isn’t done, the house is an even more incredible mess than it was last weekend when I hadn’t cleaned for four weeks.

M’hijito having fed me a bottle of ginger ale by way of clearing the vile taste, I guess I’m off Atkins today. That is, I expect, a good reason to serve up either the dregs of the wine or a bottle of beer. And so, to work…