I have great news to report. Not just that the blog is active again (I know many of you must have been waiting with great anxiety for the latest thrilling update on the Wheelheads), but because I have not one, but two items of great news. The first, and by far less significant, is that the great powder room renovation in nearly complete! I successfully installed a new floor, replaced the cabinet, reseated the toilet not once, but twice, and have pretty much finished the painting--walls, door, and window and door frames. I still need to install the toilet paper thing (where you put the new roll on) and touch up the ceiling...oh, and put in quarter round peg along the baseboards. But other than that, the project is done! With tomorrow being a holiday for me, I will probably be knocking out all the rest of it, with the possible exception of the quarter round. It may not be much to most, but for me and my track record with big projects, this is something to celebrate.
The second bit of great news, and one that will rank much lower in the estimation of some, is our apparent victory over the wheat bugs. Miss Saccharine is way into whole foods and eating good stuff, and consequently chooses to make bulk purchases of some of our staples from organic farms. One in particular (but which shall remain anonymous) offered their locally grown wheat (we have normally purchased Montana wheat from them) at a great price two years ago. We got a couple of 50 pound bags, but discovered that the wheat was not only really dirty, but that it had gone wormy. We didn't think that much about the worms, figuring that they would die once we vacuum packed the wheat in buckets. Wrong. Either the vacuum packing didn't work or the worms turned out to anaerobic. Either way, when we opened the first bucket a few weeks later, a number of small moth-like bugs flew out of the bucket and sevreted themselves all over our basement. We have spent the last two years locked in mortal combat with these insidious pests.
They are actually relatively innocuous insects. They don't make any noise, generally leave you alone, don't bite, and genearlly leave you in peace. However, they reproduce fairly rapidly, utilizing any and every available grain source as their breeding grounds. Having lots of little kids in the house with our whole foods and grains means that we have lots of such breeding grounds available in our pantry, which is where they eventually established their home base and have for the last two years done nothing but crawl around our walls, copulate prodigiously, and provide us numerous opportunities to stalk them.
On the plus side, they are very slow-moving and relatively fragile, thus easy to kill. On the down side, they are a brownish-gray color, which means they are adept at hiding themselves on our kitchen cabinets. We initially had great success as they began their assault on the ground floor of the house, because they stood out like gangbusters against the white walls of the stairway. However, once they established their pantry beachhead, it was pretty much game over. They had too many places to lay their eggs that we seldom got around to discovering until every bit of grain in the bag had been eaten through by larval worms. On a normal day, I killed between five and 10 bugs, thinking that surely with that kind of slaughter, they couldn't last much longer. However, the occasional upstairs trespasser let me know that the problem wasn't going away.
I was particularly disturbed starting last spring when Delta started calling me into her room right after bedtime to tell me that a "wheatfly" was bothering her. I assured her it couldn't be so, but she insisted. I'd go in, turn on the light, and wouldn't you know it, there was one of them, as brazen as anything sitting on the wall. They being pretty stupid and slow once they were stationary, I would dispatch of the offender and put Delta back to bed. However, I started getting enormous bugs flying up from the basement that looked like the third Pokemon evolution of my wheat bugs--veritable Charizards to the Charmanders I'd been dealing with for months. This new beastie nearly drove me to sending Miss Saccharine and the kids to her parents' place so I could buy a bunch of bug bombs and unleash chemical warfare on my flying adversaries.
Well might you ask yourself what turned the tide and led to my "Mission Accomplished" moment. Well, early this last fall, Miss Saccharine and I decided that the many skid marks on the upper walls and ceiling of the pantry had gotten out of control, and it was time to "drain the swamp" where these terrorists had their breeding ground. We spent the better part of a Saturday morning clearing out the pantry shelf by shelf, wiping up every bit of grain and flour, and throwing out literally dozens of bags that had either been left open or which these pests had forced their way into and set up shop. We didn't complete all the shelves that day, but the number of daily kills dropped to about one or two per day. However, it wasn't until I discovered that they also were using cardboard locales for their illicit activities that we shut off the final tap. Several boxes of crackers (mostly just crumbs) and single-serving oatmeal packets (suspiciously torn open and left half-eaten by certain boys who will remain nameless) also went into the trash. I killed a few more bugs over the next couple of weeks.
We are now going on six weeks without a single kill. I check the pantry every day for signs of their return, but so far nothing. Lest you think this latest success is merely the result of the onset of winter, you should know that the bugs did not take either of the last two winters off--the kill rate for both years was essentially the same as it was in spring and summer.
Having now conquered (pretty much) both a significant (to me) home improvement project and my winged nemeses, I feel pretty good about declaring victory, at least for today, the last day of a pretty good year for the Wheelheads.
Thanks for reading. I look forward to posting more regularly in the future, and hope that you will return and enjoy my musings. Wishing you the best for 2008.
Wheelhead
