The Pest Nest

Of all the problems that I've had with my new house, the worst thing one of many worst things about it is the cockroaches.

Cockroaches! I didn't see that coming. When I first visited the place in May, it was unoccupied and clean as a whistle (or so my selective vision told me). I saw no sign of a roach and didn't even stop to consider that pests might be an issue. When I moved in a month later, I did spy one cockroach, which gave me palpitations, but only mild ones—I'd seen a roach the day I moved into my last apartment, and nothing had come of that. Fast-forward to late July. It was a month after we'd moved in, and suddenly cockroaches were quite literally coming out of the woodwork! (Is that where this phrase comes from?)

This brings me to my moral dilemma. How does a vegetarian who cares for all creatures, great and small, deal with disgusting insects that are invading her home?

Well, every vegetarian has to draw the line somewhere. You can love all living things, but if they don't respect boundaries and they are a legitimate threat to your way of life, then your only recourse is to kill them. I've had to go through the same thing with bedbugs (no one can really blame you for trying to eradicate a pest that feeds on your own body) and ants.

The ants decided my desk at work was the best place for an ongoing party! After trying numerous times to dissuade them with various strongly scented oils, I finally had to resort to extermination. I am not a fan of using baits or poison. They seem underhanded ("Come here little buggy-buggy, I have a treat for you...it's death!") and sadistic (having suffered food poisoning before, I would never wish that kind of fate on anyone!). And the kind of sticky trap that causes animals to rip their own legs off in an attempt to escape is just cruel. Another option I might have mentioned before is diatomaceous earth, a long-established insect killer that works by creating micro-punctures in the animal's exoskeleton, causing it to lose too much liquid to the surrounding environment. I'm not sure death by desiccation is really much better than many others, but at least with a DE barrier, the bugs won't come to any harm if they just stay clear of it and out of my space! So I dusted diatomaceous earth around all the cracks in my window, and soon the ants were gone. Though I was sad about my murderous ways, I could not function at work with ants crawling all over me.

This summer, our house for some reason developed an infestation of flies. I was trying to ignore them, but I was so fed up by the time I went to the Fulton County Fair, I actually picked up a free promotional flyswatter so I could end the constant buzzing around my head. I never needed to put the flyswatter to use, as the flies had pretty much all disappeared by the time I brought it home, and I was relieved to not have to play executioner to countless insects just trying to live their short lives.

Roaches, however, are a whole different story.

This isn't my first brush with cockroaches—when I moved into an apartment for the first time in 2006, I not only met my first cockroach; I met thousands of them. Every night, the roaches swarmed out from the kitchen in droves. They nested in everything. They loved my roommate's laptop so much that they clogged its fan and made it chronically overheat. There were so many cockroaches in that apartment, you could smell them—it is true; they do have a smell. And it wasn't pleasant. It didn't take me long to learn to hate roaches with every fiber of my being—and to show cockroaches no mercy. If I were the type of person to invent mottoes, one of them would be "Thou shalt not suffer a roach to live." 

Since I was seeing roaches with more and more frequency as August drew to a close, I unwrapped a package of cockroach baits. With other insects, I think of baits as a dishonest way to trick a poor unsuspecting animal...but with roaches, I think baits are the only way to get rid of them before they've taken over your whole house. However, the baits aren't working. Not only did one of our stupid dogs find and eat one, causing a brief terror (later we learned that the roach poison is essentially harmless to humans and pets), but they didn't seem to do anything to rid us of roaches. If anything, their population has ballooned! 

In June, I started by seeing a nymph here or there, creeping around the bathroom or the kitchen sink...then it escalated to a nymph or two, maybe every other day...then I started seeing adults scuttling about. Now (especially at night) I find multiple roaches almost every time I enter the kitchen. One horrifying morning, I found three roaches of various ages, just chilling out in the bottom of a saucepan in the drying rack!

I've had to pull out all the stops for this tenacious population. No method of extermination is too gruesome—though I still prefer a good, honest, and quick demise like squashing them to death. That flyswatter has finally come to use after all; I now pick it up every time I enter the kitchen and prepare to do battle. Last night, I took all the contents out of the two cabinets that seem to be harboring the most roaches, and sprinkled diatomaceous earth along all the edges. And if that doesn't slow down the little vermin, my next step will be a combo treatment with borax.

After that? Well, my sincere hope is that it will be nothing. I hope I'll be able to get rid of the roaches and never see one again. Twice now, I've lived in a house where a new resident brought her own little cockroach collection from an infested apartment (one of those times I was that resident - yikes!), but I've never actually faced down an already-established colony of cockroaches. I can only hope that this isn't going to be a multi-month war like the one against the bedbugs.

A story about stories

Today was the first day since starting March SOLSC that I didn't already have a topic ready, waiting, and partially written. And naturally that obliged me to start thinking about what I should write about—and what I shouldn't.

Sometimes, I just want to share my opinion. Sometimes I want to get a little bit preachy. Sometimes I want to write sweeping statements about the world, humanity, morality, and big words. Yet I am writing for the Slice of Life Story  Challenge—not an "essay" challenge or a "missive" challenge or a "manifesto" challenge.

And that's fine. I'm not very good at writing essays or missives or manifestos. Occasionally I get grandiose ideas about these sorts of topics, and I start to lay them out in Springpad for future blogging. And then they languish. After a few sentences, what seemed like a brilliant idea has fallen flat. It's rare that I actually follow through with a philosophical topic.

In thinking about why these topics aren't quite right for Slice of Life, I realize why they don't work for me in general: it's because they aren't stories. My best (or at least, most readable) blog posts are stories. They're what I'm good at.* They have a beginning, a middle, a few silly digressions,** and an end. And at the end, that's where the moral lies, if there's one at all. I usually try to end my posts with some sort of conclusion, but I guess that's not necessary. Sometimes a story for the story's sake is good enough. As contrasted to a lesson for the lesson's sake, which is typically just boring.

Having thought the dickens out of all that, I suddenly realize I have a topic for my Day 7 Slice of Life! I will tell about how I came to learn that, when struggling to find the words to express how I feel about deep subjects like the distribution of wealth, maybe the best approach is to find a story and express it that way.

Not every story has a moral, but this one does: Some way, somehow, every moral has a story.

*Not to toot my own horn or anything.
**Like these ones.

Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance

At work, I have a reputation for outspoken clumsiness. These days, whenever I let out a squawk because I've just caught my finger in a crate or dumped an entire scoop of trail mix everywhere but into its intended bag, they say I'm having a "Valerie moment."

At home, I keep a bottle of hydrogen peroxide around to clean the clothing I'm always bleeding on. The most mundane of tasks result in injury. Yesterday, while washing my bike, I managed to put a 2-inch scratch in my forearm when I spun the wheel and spun my arm with it, straight into the gears. This morning, while putting the hose attachment on the vacuum cleaner, I whacked my hand into a sharp edge and scraped my knuckle. I also walked into a doorknob, a car door, and a wall. Just now, I kicked my ankle into the leg of my chair hard enough to remove the top layer of skin. [Edit: the next day: And then I bruised my knee while getting into bed!]

If ever there is a day that I don't have some self-inflicted injury somewhere on my body, I think angels would descend from the heavens and sing halleluia.

Surprisingly though, when working on more difficult chores, I escape mostly unscathed. Perhaps its because having to concentrate on an unfamiliar task makes me work more slowly and carefully. In any case, my mission today was to adjust the poorly shifting gears on my bicycle.

Last year, a clicking noise caused me to take old Greenie to REI, where it waited 3 weeks in the shop before finally getting tuned up. After that, the brakes worked better, but the clicking noise was still there! I took it back to REI, where they determined the source of the noise to be a loose pedal. This year, I decided not to put my bike into the incompetent, expensive, and slow-moving hands of REI employees, and do it myself instead.

The following resources were helpful in educating me on the workings and repair of a bike gear shift: http://www.ehow.com/video_4985712_fix-poorly-shifting-bicycle.html, http://www.ehow.com/how_117871_fix-poorly-shifting.html. But I still had to resort to a lot of trial and error to get it done. At one point, I was terrified that I had rendered the bike completely unrideable and would have to shamefacedly take it to REI to be put to rights. But I tried again and got it into a semblance of working order. I might have even fixed it! The gears shift now, with little of the slipping, grinding, and gabbling that plagued me before. And at no point did I cause injury to myself! My fingertips are a little raw from yanking on cables, but they'll get over it.

The moral of this story is: If simple tasks cause you woe, complex tasks are the way to go!

An Eye-Opening Experience

Originally, I was planning on writing a post on the way I (and people in general, I think) always find something to be discontent about. Whenever we get what we want, we find something else to want instead. I was going to discuss, as an example, how when I'm feeling fat, all I can think about is how fat I am. But when I get over that, then I find myriad other things to hate about myself—such as the breadth of my shoulders, the narrowness of my mouth, the knobbiness of my knuckles. It's always something. I was going to talk about that, but then I ran across a much more interesting topic.

You see, the object of my self-loathing these days is my eyelids. Yes, my eyelids.  It seems to me that almost everyone else has fairly discreet eyelids. You see maybe a millimeter or two of the upper lids before they disappear under a fold of skin that I'd consider part of the eyebrow. If you happen to be East Asian, you probably don't have any visible eyelid at all!

Eyelids done right

Not so with me. I've got eyelids the size of Delaware. If I look straight at you, you can see the contour of almost my entire eyeball behind the upper lid! This, in my humble opinion, is not an attractive effect. It makes me look perpetually sad and sleepy. Possibly bug-eyed as well.

And so, bemoaning my fate as the ugliest human being ever to walk this earth, I set out to determine why this is so. I considered briefly that my eyes were set too deep into my skull, but rejected that, as it would cause just the opposite of a bug-eyed look. Then I considered that they might be set too far forward in my skull, but experiments with pushing my eyeballs back farther into the sockets (not a behavior that I would recommend, but I did it for science!) just caused my upper lids to look droopy and the "crease" (as it is known to those familiar with makeup tips) separating my eyelid and eyebrow to disappear entirely. So I concluded that my eye sockets are simply too big! There is a space between them and the eyes themselves—creating a hollow into which my flesh sinks, rather than folding neatly on the surface like eyelids are supposed to do! This also provides a tidy explanation for the circles under my eyes that persist no matter how much I sleep.

Following this epiphany, I set out on an image search for "eyes" to see just how uncommon my eyelid configuration is. The fruits of my search yielded the pictures of eyelids done right that you have been admiring above, but no pictures of eyelids that look like mine. They did, however, include a few results that led me to another epiphany. As I usually discover when I become excessively interested in a subject that I think is unclassifiable, there is a WORD for the object of my obsession—and that word is "heavy-lidded."

Funny, I have seen that term in literature numerous times, yet I never gave thought to how it would actually look outside the pages of a novel. But there it is, staring me in my heavy-lidded face!

The next phase in my journey of discovery occurred when I learned that a synonym for heavy-lidded eyes is "bedroom eyes." Now that was a shocker. See, I've always heard "bedroom eyes" used in a complimentary way. And since, in my mind, the defining characteristic of beautiful eyes is size (the bigger, the better—and if you look like an anime character, that's the best), I always assumed "bedroom eyes" meant "eyes the size of an entire bedroom." No, it turns out bedroom eyes are called so because they look sleepy, like the eyes of someone who's about to go to bed. Apparently, bedroom eyes are considered "sultry" and "seductive" because of other things people do in bed when they're not sleeping.

Apparently as well, bedroom eyes are best exemplified by the late film star Bette Davis. Some people think Bette Davis' eyes are just the cat's pajamas. I personally was never impressed when I saw pictures of Bette Davis, but it's comforting to know that my funny-looking eyelids are in such well-respected company.

↑ Bette Davis' Eyes . . . My eyes ↑

That's right, world! I've got Bette Davis eyes! (I even have her asymmetrical eyebrow elevation!) And, while "sultry" and "seductive' are not exactly the look I was aspiring to, I guess I'll take what I can get.

The moral of this story is, (in rhyme, just as in the best Aesop's fables):
Even if there's something about you that you hate,
Someone else probably thinks it's great.

More than you ever wanted to read about seagulls

I like what Anonymous had to say about my Wireless Conundrum a few days ago. Unfortunately, I had to delete his or her comment, because it linked to a whole collection of dubious websites. In fact, I don't think Anonymous really cared about my conundrum at all, and it was pure coincidence that his or her comment contained such pertinent wisdom: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

I have a pretty decent cell phone provider already. Why stress myself out about picking a new one? I like the phone I've got, and the only time I'm unhappy with Verizon (Verizon Verizon Verizon! Read my blog!) is when I receive a gratuitous text message. So yes, I'll keep the bird in my hand and forget about bushwhacking for a bigger better deal.

Speaking of birds, don't you just love seagulls? The rest of this post is going to be about seagulls, because it's about time someone gave them the attention they deserve!

I got started on this topic because I was listening to my dance mix CD and noticed that one of the less-listened-to songs on it (Wave, by RAH) has seagull noises! Whee! That made my day! I think I have to modify one of the criteria for my favorite music: Everything's better with a synthesizer, and everything's better with a seagull. After I heard that, I tried to think of other songs with seagulls in them, but surprisingly, drew a blank. I could swear there were a ton of them. The only one that I can think of that comes close, though, is Belfast by Orbital, which does not actually have seagulls in it, but the high-pitched whiny sound in it reminds me of them. Surely there are others! I even found a whole forum thread about songs with seagull noises, but I didn't recognize any of them!

Alas.

Well, the other great thing about seagulls is that, not only do they make cute noises, but they look cute too! Check out the multitude of seagulls that I photographed on my recent trip to California!

And then check out this fun buddy icon I made in honor of a Rolling Stones song that supposedly goes "No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue." Ha. We all know what the real lyric is!

But wait! There's more! There's the Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video! Which is not only funny, but features at the end - yes - a seagull! Oh wait! There's one more video on YouTube featuring seagulls. You must see it. It's a true work of art!

Oh yeah! And if you visit The Silly Side, you might just read a story about a seagull or two! And after that, you will probably be tired of seagulls. I will never get tired of seagulls, but I will understand if you want to call it quits. I'll let you rest until tomorrow. We'll talk more about squirrels!

A blog to match my attention span

Can't focus! Can't be brilliant and longwinded (true; I can always be longwinded, but right now, not brilliant at the same time). So here are some thoughts that have been amusing/puzzling/plaguing me all day. From a time when I was much more brilliant.

1. Today I was sitting at a restaurant at lunch, and a lady wandered in, said she was learning photography, and asked if she could take some pictures of me. I said sure! She said she was working for NPR. I guess this means I have a face meant for radio.
2. I was also at work today, and some rowdies came in. OK, maybe they weren't rowdies, but they definitely had made it their goal to flirt with every female who passed in front of them. They were at the coffee table, trying to figure out what the milk was. "Is this milk?" "It says, 'MOMs Organic Whole Milk.'" To me: "Are you Mom?" Me to them: "The store is MOM." Them to me: Some other rowdy nonsense plus, "You look wholesome." I guess I'll take it as a compliment. Even though how it fits into a discussion about milk is not something I prefer to think on too deeply.
3. Speaking of Mom...I think shopping for someone else's baby has to be almost as bad as actually having a baby. That's what I did this afternoon. Shopping. Not having. After I was done, I wanted to run around in circles and scream.
4. A constant source of mystery to me, addressed bluntly at last. Yes, today was full of compliments, disturbing and otherwise. The person I was having lunch with said, "I'm actually kind of surprised you're unattached." I told him I guessed that was a compliment? But what I really thought was, "Yeah, why am I unattached? It's not fair!" and then, to him, I answered our question. "I guess I'm too picky." Oh, sudden enlightenment comes crashing down! The truth spoken before I even knew it was the truth. There's more to the truth than that, and it has to do with how you define "attached," but since I can't be brilliant, I'm certainly not going to elaborate on this touchy subject.
5. I've developed a new one to add to my versatile list of mottos: "The party always gets better when you retreat to the kitchen and start playing word games." I think this one has potential. Yes. One day my little saying will supersede "E Pluribus Unum."
6. Oh, here's another one: "Understatement is the better part of valor." I don't know what it means. But it sounds wise.
7. If you like to hear little nonsensical bits like this on a regular basis, you should visit my Twitter page. Didn't know I had a Twitter page? I haven't marketed it all that well, mostly because it's unmarketable. But I know that if you're reading this, you love me, and you'll love to hear my valueless thoughts at www.twitter.com/valsgalore