domestic outrages chronicle

not seeing where in my house these dudes can be breeding so i'm gonna work hard this weekend on identifying any possible dead animals or stray garbage in the vicinity

Awwww

Stray garbage is a kinda sad term

dude building my fence found some buried garbage today. Apparently people used to do this before trash pickup was a thing. Outrageously old trash in my yard but some cool old bottles c. 1920.

i set the trap on my deck. let's see if this works. i'm betting no :(

so pleased to report the fly population in my kitchen has taken a huge dive. the offending garbage can seems to have left the area, too, so i don't know what caused it. i didn't look at the trap to see if i really caught any. i feel superstitious about it.

nm i just looked and there are NO flies in the trap. i can't believe all that was caused by a single uncovered trash can. like i literally vacuumed up 1000 flies. or it was something in my own walls and they ran out of food. i don't know. fuck.

maybe they just got born nearby and were sticking close to home till they were better at being flies. and now they've moved away from home to start their own families?

there's one room in one of the residence halls on my campus that every year for decades has been the site of an annual ladybug outbreak. they're only there for a few days and then they go away. but

1. a lot of them die there
2. too much of anything is freaky, not matter how cute or benign
3. infant ladybugs are very very ugly and gross

so every year the students assigned to that room freak the fuck out but of course no one will do anything because, ladybugs.

ladybugs smell kind of bad, too

flies are not totally gone but slowed. but based on what i know about population models that doesn't mean the battle is over. my kitchen also has ants. every spring i put out one of those baits that they carry back to the nest, poisoning all the ants. it doesn't seem to have worked this year. i put out another one. one thing i am enjoying is i watched them totally clean a dead fly off the ground little by little. it was very entertaining.

Are they ladybugs or Asian lady beetles? I learned last fall that the latter are prominent here...my front porch looked like a plague was upon my house. I also went to a cemetery walk that weekend and everyone spent the whole time swatting them away/off their persons which was pretty creepy.

We got flyinfested today. I was home late and ms mac was unimpressed about everything, just the whole generality of things.

Also i left my football boots outside but upsidedown and i reckoned thatd be grand well twas grand indeed for the woodlice that created an enclave in them and only uncharacteristic caution didnt have my foot in them rather than a gentle admonitory shake and a spin in a cool wash.

Nobody outraged except herself and tbh she seems to enjoy it

is a woodlice a potato bug?

or is it a rollypolly?

Wow racist harbl

It is a woodlouse. I could google to see if that was equivalent to either but dont feel tbrrrwu that the onus rested with me there

racist harbl had some major fly problem improvements over the last few days. yesterday i didn't see any. today i vacuumed up two.

the grass is growing too fast.

Have you established a root cause

I have the seed of an idea.

well, shoot

the mailman kicked my mint plant and broke my terra cotta pot

terracotta?

basil should have bit him on the shin.

when i went to college i bought an ivy plant and hung it through the struts in the drop ceiling of my dorm

two years later when i returned from spring break i figured i'd give it a good watering by leaving it in the sink, in a different dorm, for 10 minutes and letting it soak up what it wanted

came back 10 minutes later and it was gone

still bitter about this 20 years later tbqpf

Ivy drip
Ivy league

Couple others that didnt even reach that standard tbh

ivy good mind to smack you for those

i like this spelled-out units-of-time ago

it is midnight here, 89°F, humidity 70%, dew point 78°F, 'feels like' 101°F

i have arranged for my meagre estate to support beta dot ilxor dot com slash sandbox, with the caveat that it be hull city branded

was outside around 10 last night, it was 88 heat index 97, felt so bad and oppressive. moving to canada.

our yard and food waste pick-up has been missed at least 10 times since spring. it is outrageous.

it's outrageous that we don't even have that

we are not allowed to put yard waste in regular bins but they don't provide pickup. you have to drive it to a contracted compost site. outrageous!

it is sad you all don't have curbside food and yard waste service.

it is mandatory here. however, it wasn't picked up again this week. outrageous, again.

it's an outrage. really, who wants to collect and bag the thorny prunings a of a rose bush? this is why my roses are so unkempt (to which lxy can attest!)

but pretty!

the sound in my wall came back so i called an electrician but then it wouldn't make the sound so now i'm afraid my house is going to burn down

or my house is possessed.

that was weird. did the electricians come and not hear it so they just left?

it actually happened again in the wall by the stove and the only way i could get it to stop was to turn the breaker off. when the electrician came we turned it back on and no noise! he said he can't diagnose without hearing it or tearing the wall open so call him when/if it happens again.

it is my policy to be gentle with ghosts in my house, and aggressive with electrical problems.

at least the 6th week in a row our food and yard waste wasn't collected. i got into it a little bit with jermaine on the phone just now. while listening the world's most depressing hold music, i considered the possibility of asking him if it he was okay with me getting sweary for a minute.

our outflow goes under our sitting room and water pressure isnt always enough and.... stuff.... gets stuck under our floor and it smells like..... stuff.... for a while

oh dear.

i renewed my home warranty today because i have now been domesticated one year!

the free, biweekly local newspaper has stopped coming to me. did i offend the paper boy?

mayb it was an introductory offer?

nope. small town paper is free for everyone all the time! (you get what you pay for, including gumshoe reporter who likes to look for scandal in fine arts commission meetings, lol)

a bad little bush turkey has moved into our street and keeps digging up people's plants with it's long toes and about once a day it crosses our yard and comes right up to the sliding door and peers into our living room and does an expressionless little throat gobble and then wanders off again. it's quite skinny and short so you can't easily see it when it's behind a plant. i hope it stays, i love it, but the fusspots with the dead plants want it to clear off.

how wonderfully disgraceful

i hope it doesn't dig up your ficus

my ficus is in heaven, it was here for a good time not for a long time

quality over quantity

r.i.p. ficus, we never knew you

male ficus