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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Housefly Lady

This would not have been my first choice of tasks to be greeted with in the morning. 

As I lifted the blinds on the living room windows to accept the morning light, I saw them: flies.  A dozen or more, camped out on my window, sitting pretty in what they assumed was a safe and cozy habitat.

They assumed wrong.  

Spiders, crickets, creepy crawlies, I am afraid of.  Flies, I LOATHE & DESPISE.  The buzzing, dizzying annoyance of them makes my skin crawl and fills me with a sense of purpose: to get rid of the flies, with all due speed.

As soon as I sized up the enemy, I armed myself with my hot pink fly swatter and stealthily approached the window.  I aimed, I fired...

And got ONE.  One measly fly while the rest were scattered by the wind swooshing off my pink swatter. 

No matter, I pressed on.  Mia and Lauren whimpered on the couch while I became unhinged in my pursuit of flies.  With my swatter poised for the kill, I tiptoed and dashed - snuck and darted, aiming to rid my home of my enemies.  I hunted them down until I could find no more, and scooped up their remains to be dumped in the trashcan.  I assured my girls that they could uncover their eyes; the mad swatter was done.

If only I'd known. 

For there in the kitchen was another colony of flies on the back doormat, basking in the morning sun.  I began again with my swatting, fueled by disbelief that so many flies had multiplied in my house overnight.  Where did they come from?  How had they gotten in?  By the time I finished up this round of fly swatting, I'd broken a sweat from my exertions.  During all the practice, I'd gotten so accurate in my aim that I'd even managed to take down a few nasty flies in mid air.  The satisfaction of feeling the fly hit the plastic and shoot off into the distance was a beautiful thing.  Never mind that I couldn't find where the flattened fly had landed; at least it wasn't buzzing and darting around me any longer. 

I went about the rest of my day in relative peace, stopping to grab my swatter several times for a lone fly that had escaped my early morning raid.  But I didn't come across an entire family reunion of flies again.  I was confident that I'd taken care of the majority of the problem. Nipped it in the bud.

When I finally sat down to relax after the kids were in bed for the night, I heard it again: BZZZzzzzZZZZzzzzz.  Flies.  One in particular was zipping around my head over and over again.  I carefully stood up with a look of stern concentration and tracked it - where else? - to the same window in which I'd found the first fly colony.  It landed among a group of lazily wandering flies.  I counted them. 

ELEVEN.  What.  The.  Heck.  I'd been knocking flies across rooms and smashing them against windows all day.  I'd probably killed 50 flies already, and here were eleven more?  Unbelievable.  Never fear, though.  Housefly Lady With Pink Swatter to the rescue. 

After my initial fly-scattering swat, I stood crouched in front of the window, waiting for the little hoodlums to return.  I barely moved my head, using only my eyes to track their erratic paths.  But these late evening flies were the ones that had evaded me all day; they were resilient.  I'd smash them to the ground and go to scoop them up only to have them fly away again. 

At one point I caught sight of my reflection in the dark window: crouched, poised, scowling, hovering, then weilding my swatter like a hot pink sword.  I was profoundly glad that the window isn't able to be seen by any neighbors - my level of dedication was fanatical.  It took every ounce of my concentration to get rid of that last lot of flies.  But I did it.

The flies lost and I...

Wait...

BZzzzzZZZZzzzzZZZZ...


And I give up.  I will now be going crazy. 

Pray that my rubber room has no flies, will you?

9 comments:

  1. maybe its the time of year but i have also been swarmed by flies lately. i killed 25 in one day last week. they are beyond gross. i think its the kids leaving the door open.

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  2. We havent' had a problem in a while, but this used to happen to us. My sweet husband insisted that they were growing somewhere in the house 'because it is so filthy'. Filthy??? I wonder if he knew how much he insulted me. That explanation is simply not plausible. I do not know where they came from, but I do have a simpler solution to getting rid of them. I chased those flies most wrathfully with the vacuum cleaner hose and sucked them all up. The only thing is, they stay alive inside the vacuum cleaner bag for a while so you have to plug up its opening or they will fly out the hose. My vacuum cleaner has a little lid you can close but I'm sure you could accomplish that with a wad of plastic bag or something. You just have to be quick to get it in place as soon as you shut off the suction or the flies will escape. Believe me, it is much more efficient than a fly swatter. I felt like the Grim Reaper of Flydom with that thing.

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  3. Eek. At least they're not roaches. We've been battling those for several weeks and they're big and nasty and they FLY. Good luck on your campaign- kill, Sarah, kill!

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  4. I am laughing to the point of tears here! Sorry!
    You might enjoy a craft I saw recently where a mom took an old flip flop, poked a hole up through the bottom edge of the sole...and glued a small dowel rod into the hole to make...voila! A FLY SWATTER!
    Thanks so much for you kind words on my blog: A Thankful Woman's Book of Blessings! I'm really glad you stopped by!

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  5. Hilarious!
    You'll have to start training your girls in your ways. My parents would give each of us a swatter and we would have to kill ten before we could do X. That taught us to keep the door closed!

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  6. Oh gross! But, I know how you feel. Flies make me a little batty, too. Fortunately Katherine's an even more zealous fly-hunter than I am, so she looks at each infestation as a fun challenge, which helps to keep me sane. I say give Mia a fly swatter and make it a family affair!

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  7. Pesky little boogers...maybe if you left the spiders in your house, they'd take care of the flies for you...but then you'd have spiders all over *shudder*

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  8. So funny...and gross :)
    We had that problem about a month ago. I hate them also as much...I mean, I clean my house, take out the garbage and there are STILL flies as big as my fist (mild exaggeration).
    I staged my very own Fly Armageddon ;)
    Good luck! They'll eventually go away.

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  9. We're inundated with flies, too. Only my husband whips them with a dish towel a la locker-room bottom snapping. It's quite dramatic.

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Hmm...And how did that make you FEEL?