The SyFy Channel horror movie I won't be writing
Last summer, my condo developed moths. Clothes moths, I determined, after doing a Google search. Puzzling, since I had a grand total of one wool coat and no wool sweaters (itchy!), and I learned that the females can't fly, so if your wool or leather is hanging, as my coat was, it's safe. Checked the coat just to be sure, and there was no evidence of them. I was at a loss, thought maybe they'd flown in from another apartment in the building. And then I opened the drawer with the extra cat toys in it. See, clothes moths also like fur and feathers. Like the little fur-covered mouse toys, and the various ones with a couple of fluffy feathers. Oh, and there's the "Wooly Bully," which they go crazy over for a couple of days when I get it out, and which is basically a chipmunk-sized blob of felted wool with eyes and whiskers. Or it was: now it's in a landfill, because someone other than the cats was crazy about it. The mice went out, too. Everything else in the drawer went into the freezer, since common wisdom is that two or three days there will kill the little buggers. Hey, I have room in my freezer, so why not just have the unused cat toys live there as a matter of course? I figured that had solved the problem.
But I kept finding evidence of them, especially in polar fleece. The larvae can't actually eat polar fleece, but I guess mom doesn't get that, so she lays her eggs, and they hatch, and then in short order they die, leaving tiny, empty casings. But somewhere, someone was living to adulthood, or there wouldn't be anyone to lay those frickin' eggs. I moved later in the summer, and in the new place, I'd still find evidence of them, or see one flying around. Not many, just enough to make me growl. And then a few weeks ago, Chess barfed on a dining room chair.
I have a nice dining set, but I rarely use it for actual sitting and eating; that's one of the hazards of living alone. It has the usual padded seats, covered in white cloth. Chess likes to sit there, and Chess is black, so I made some covers for the seats, just rectangles of fabric, really, scraps from a green sheet on top, scraps from a black cloak I'd made for someone years ago on the bottom. A black wool cloak. Since I never sit there, I never move the covers, and I never think about them at all. Even when I moved, the movers just moved the chairs with the pads on them. And then Chess barfed, and I was cleaning up, and, as they say up here, light dawned over Marblehead.
I will not regale you with tales of what I found when I moved the covers. Suffice it to say that the covers went out to the dumpster right then, in the pouring rain. I used packing tape to remove what I could of any eggs and detritus from the actual chairs; those aren't wool, but it's not like I want crud in them. But anyway, mystery solved.
And then last week I had another epiphany. No cat barf involved, but another instance of suddenly seeing something that's been in plain sight. I sew. I have a lot of fabric, some of which I bought with no clear purpose, or a purpose that isn't very high-priority, or... well, I have a lot of fabric. A good decade ago, I made wooden boxes on wheels to exactly fit the dimensions of the space under my bed, so I could use every cubic inch possible; I put the lowest-priority stuff in those boxes. One box is mainly various scraps from completed projects, some of which I will someday use for a quilt, some of which I just keep because you never know when you might need a smallish piece of some particular fabric. I don't think about those boxes often, because I don't get anything out of them. So, remember how the dining chair covers were backed with scraps from a wool cloak? Guess where the rest of those scraps were. Yeah. Which reminded me that I also have other wool fabric in another box.
I didn't deal with it last week, partly because I was just too busy with a major work project, but partly because I knew it would suck. I'm very good at dreading things, and as the week went on, I contemplated the horrors awaiting me. Finally yesterday, I woke up with an intractable migraine, low-grade but not responding to drugs, which meant I wasn't going to get any work done, and I thought, well, if I'm going to be miserable anyway, I might as well deal.
I opened the two non-wool boxes first. Given the females' love for polar fleece, I thought there was a good possibility that they'd laid eggs everywhere. Dread dread dread. But all I found were a couple of silk casings. Still, the real fun was in the other two boxes. Dread dread dread.
The great thing about dread is that very few calamities live up to the horrors in your head. (Hey, that rhymes!) The box with the full pieces of fabric had some casings in the wool, but only one tiny hole that I saw, and no living creatures. The second box was worse, with a noticeable amount of frass (it's the official term, and very evocative), although strangely, that was in the non-wool scraps. Mainly, I was just relieved that it wasn't a scene out of "Fear Factor," and I didn't find anyone alive and moving and ick.
Anyway, I took the wool and other affected scraps down to the laundry area and soaked them in scalding water in the big basin, and then dried them on high, which didn't seem to bother the wool. I draped them artistically over the wheeled rack thingie down there overnight, to make sure they are dry, because they will be going in those heavy-duty large Zip-Loc bags when they go back under my bed, and saving them from moths only to end up with mold isn't really the point.
The only real downside is, I'd been expecting this experience to be research for a horror movie, a la SyFy's "Mansquito" or "Night of the Lepus" or something, in which mutant clothes moths develop a taste for human flesh. Perhaps with machine guns that shoot mothballs. But I guess I'll have to go back to dark, depressing navel-gazing stuff.
Originally posted at http://violetcheetah.dreamwidth.org/38312.html. Feel free to comment there
comments
But I kept finding evidence of them, especially in polar fleece. The larvae can't actually eat polar fleece, but I guess mom doesn't get that, so she lays her eggs, and they hatch, and then in short order they die, leaving tiny, empty casings. But somewhere, someone was living to adulthood, or there wouldn't be anyone to lay those frickin' eggs. I moved later in the summer, and in the new place, I'd still find evidence of them, or see one flying around. Not many, just enough to make me growl. And then a few weeks ago, Chess barfed on a dining room chair.
I have a nice dining set, but I rarely use it for actual sitting and eating; that's one of the hazards of living alone. It has the usual padded seats, covered in white cloth. Chess likes to sit there, and Chess is black, so I made some covers for the seats, just rectangles of fabric, really, scraps from a green sheet on top, scraps from a black cloak I'd made for someone years ago on the bottom. A black wool cloak. Since I never sit there, I never move the covers, and I never think about them at all. Even when I moved, the movers just moved the chairs with the pads on them. And then Chess barfed, and I was cleaning up, and, as they say up here, light dawned over Marblehead.
I will not regale you with tales of what I found when I moved the covers. Suffice it to say that the covers went out to the dumpster right then, in the pouring rain. I used packing tape to remove what I could of any eggs and detritus from the actual chairs; those aren't wool, but it's not like I want crud in them. But anyway, mystery solved.
And then last week I had another epiphany. No cat barf involved, but another instance of suddenly seeing something that's been in plain sight. I sew. I have a lot of fabric, some of which I bought with no clear purpose, or a purpose that isn't very high-priority, or... well, I have a lot of fabric. A good decade ago, I made wooden boxes on wheels to exactly fit the dimensions of the space under my bed, so I could use every cubic inch possible; I put the lowest-priority stuff in those boxes. One box is mainly various scraps from completed projects, some of which I will someday use for a quilt, some of which I just keep because you never know when you might need a smallish piece of some particular fabric. I don't think about those boxes often, because I don't get anything out of them. So, remember how the dining chair covers were backed with scraps from a wool cloak? Guess where the rest of those scraps were. Yeah. Which reminded me that I also have other wool fabric in another box.
I didn't deal with it last week, partly because I was just too busy with a major work project, but partly because I knew it would suck. I'm very good at dreading things, and as the week went on, I contemplated the horrors awaiting me. Finally yesterday, I woke up with an intractable migraine, low-grade but not responding to drugs, which meant I wasn't going to get any work done, and I thought, well, if I'm going to be miserable anyway, I might as well deal.
I opened the two non-wool boxes first. Given the females' love for polar fleece, I thought there was a good possibility that they'd laid eggs everywhere. Dread dread dread. But all I found were a couple of silk casings. Still, the real fun was in the other two boxes. Dread dread dread.
The great thing about dread is that very few calamities live up to the horrors in your head. (Hey, that rhymes!) The box with the full pieces of fabric had some casings in the wool, but only one tiny hole that I saw, and no living creatures. The second box was worse, with a noticeable amount of frass (it's the official term, and very evocative), although strangely, that was in the non-wool scraps. Mainly, I was just relieved that it wasn't a scene out of "Fear Factor," and I didn't find anyone alive and moving and ick.
Anyway, I took the wool and other affected scraps down to the laundry area and soaked them in scalding water in the big basin, and then dried them on high, which didn't seem to bother the wool. I draped them artistically over the wheeled rack thingie down there overnight, to make sure they are dry, because they will be going in those heavy-duty large Zip-Loc bags when they go back under my bed, and saving them from moths only to end up with mold isn't really the point.
The only real downside is, I'd been expecting this experience to be research for a horror movie, a la SyFy's "Mansquito" or "Night of the Lepus" or something, in which mutant clothes moths develop a taste for human flesh. Perhaps with machine guns that shoot mothballs. But I guess I'll have to go back to dark, depressing navel-gazing stuff.
Originally posted at http://violetcheetah.dreamwidth.org/38312.html. Feel free to comment there
comments