Monday, August 21, 2006

Rock n Roll Pest Control

"Creatures are taking over my house
they want my food and my skin and my time
little frogs are okay
but the slugs on the rug
and giant moths send me out of my mind...

There's no place else that I can go, the only thing I can turn to
is Rock n Roll Pest Control (oh oh oh)
Rock n Roll Pest Control!"


-Rock n Roll Pest Control, Young Fresh Fellows circa 1988


I have never had bugs. With the exception of the roaches that perpetually inhabited where I lived in Russia, I have never had a bug. Oh wait, there was a roach on my counter once in college, an eesy weensy tiny one. I believe I ran out of the apartment, screamed running down the street and frantically tried to find the RA (drama queen? nah). This all happened before I went to Russia when roaches went from scary/disgusting and unthinkable to being able to smash them on the wall with my slipper without breaking my train of thought in a conversation. Ok, so I have had bugs, I guess.

But I have never had bugs stateside, and those Russian roaches, well they are altogether different, they were more like neighbors.

Until this summer, in my very first house, in my own very very old cupboards..where I heedlessly stored my food without so much as an inkling of the harm I was courting. Almonds in a dish uncovered, dates in thin plastic, pancake mix in the box...flour in the paper it came in.

Well I saw the mothies and so I knew from a previous old house that I should probably start being more careful, but since I had never really seen the ugliness they can exact (I threw away at least 10 garbage bags of floury products, cereal products, ricey products, nutty products and other stuff too) or how costly it can get to go through proper storage (dropped easily 300 dollars in August on containers that sealed with a rubber ring, new drawers and shop vac).

Yucky looking wormy things in my food!
BLEAHHH! ** chills down spin **

This is the perpetrator.

I went through all of this early August. For 3 or 4 days (because once I was done in the kitchen I had to go out to the garage where I was keeping rice and cereals) I was inspecting foods for signs of the nasty little creatures (Indian meal moths), freezing stuff that I wasn't sure about or that looked clean but might be damaged, throwing massive quantities of food away, buying traps, buying containers to store foods in and vacuuming as many crevasses I could with the shop vac I had to buy for the job.

I turned into a moth hunter. MUST. KILL. EVERYTHING.

Regular food storage stuff will not work...the food has to be frozen and then put into a container that is airtight, meaning with a rubber ring. These containers are expensive! We are talkin' 5 to 8 bucks a crack and usually they are way too small for something like a Costco amount of cereal or a big bag of flour.

I found this stuff at the local retailer that helped out with the large quantities.

There are few things as awful as feeling like your kitchen is contaminated and having to go to war...for 3 days, all I did was try to moth-proof my kitchen.

I moved all the food out of the cupboard they were calling home (where I kept all baking goodies), investigated what I needed to do online, bought up as many of the proper storage containers as I could afford and bought a drawer unit to get the things away from the original cupboard. I also put ziploc bags around everything I couldnt afford a container for (we buy things like crackers and cereal from Costco, so we typically have a ton laying around) and found where in Portland to buy the traps (harder than it sounds, no one sells moth traps).

Today I threw away my first full trap, after a mere 2 weeks.

SO, the moral of the story is, if a moth flies out of your cupboard or you see a maggotty looking larvae (AAGH!!!), webbing in the food, tell tale moth home...the sooner you attack, the more money you will save and the less food with be infested.

P.S. If you buy Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest by the Fellows, I can really guarantee you, you will chuckle at least once and it may become one of the funnest collections of music you own.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Moth killa - there should be a tv series based on that (like Relic Hunter). I am sure it would kick assth! :D
Else I think you should perhaps auction your used moth traps on Ebay, people buy strange and funny stuff all the time. In a way, it would be the moths chipping in for the household budjet. ;d

Some years ago, some wasps built their terribly-threatening big nest just underneath my bedroom window and were, as a result, paying frequent visits to my room. Wasps and I are ole time friends (having been stung many times in my childhood) and we all know each others weaknesses. So, in the end, I just borrowed a badminton racquet and practiced my swing on the little flying demons. No wonder I got better at badminton. (^^)b

I wonder if the same trick would work on annoying WASP. ;)

Anonymous said...

Oh my -- this is one scary post. Thanks for the info. Bugs totally freak me out. I can live with snakes on a plane, but not bugs in the house.

Anonymous said...

You've got moths. I have gnats.

One of the endearing things about our house is our plum tree out front and the neighbors' cherry tree I can see out our kitchen window. However, I believe these are the sources of the wonderful gnats that have found our home. I have a glass jar of vinegar sitting on the window sill in the kitchen as a death trap (one of the online suggestions I came across). I have never had gnats before and always have lots of veggies and fruit on a fruit stand. Well, now I am washing everything like crazy before eating. One day, I made my hands hurt from trying to whap at them so much. They are fast little things.

HappyChyck said...

I thought you had like one moth and was wondering why you were freakin' out over a bug...But then... OMG! It's so gross! That's craziness! That trap has totally given me the heebie jeebies! I would be on the same destructive path. Gaaaaaawwwww! Gotta go scratch.

Unknown said...

Happy chyck

One moth! Ha! I have had one moth here and there for awhile...it was when I picked up some almonds and the centers were all eaten out and there was that yucky webby stuff all over the place. Eeegh...one moth, I wish!

atpanda said...

OK, yeah, um... In Arizona we've got some bugs. We've had ants, mealy worms, cockroaches, crickets, spiders, and SCORPIONS. That sheet of moths is disgusting.

Fatma said...

Scary!!!! I just so very hate bugs! You won't believe this but we once found some roaches in the refrigerator!!! When its pretty hot we get ants, they get into the sugar jar! I think I suffer from bugphobia! How grooooosssss!!!

Fitèna

Unknown said...

Yeah roaches in the fridge is bad, but in Russia, I found one on my bed once. I didn't sleep really that night.