Compulsion!
Ever since I've been back from the hospital and halfway on my feet, I keep having the overwhelming urge to clean my house. This is somewhat understandable, considering the fact that Daniel and the boys are all avatars of chaos, and the house was pretty well nuked when I got back. But it goes further than that. I don't just want to clean, I want to organize. I want to donate tons of stuff to Goodwill. I want to repaint. Um...WTF?
Not that cleaning and organizing is a bad thing. But I still get tired really, really easily, and my doc warned me about not overdoing it. So I've started setting a kitchen timer and cleaning for 15 minutes at a time, every few hours. If I don't set the timer, I get really embedded in a task, and it somehow expands to three hours. (I need to straighten out the kitchen counter, which means I need to put the cereal boxes back in the cabinet, which means I need to go through all the cereal and dump the stale stuff into a bag for my mom's chickens, which means I need to scrub out the cereal keeper boxes before I refill them with fresh cereal, which means I need to do the rest of the dishes, which means I think my cabinet is too crowded so I need to take everything out of it and donate some chipped and ill-used glassware, and so on and so on and so on.)
The last time I got this psycho about cleaning, I was pregnant and "nesting." Since it's physically impossible that I'm pregnant now, I can only guess that I'm nesting for myself and my family. Trying to make everything clean and shiny and new so that we can all be healthy and have a good start to the spring. Or something. It's weird.
I even transplanted my carnivorous plants into a bigger, roomier terrarium today. Levi, my big Nepenthes, had totally outgrown the old one. I took enormous pleasure in sticking my hands in the dirt. I'm not well enough to garden outside just yet, but at least I got to do a little indoor gardening. Levi's looking great--he has some of the biggest pitchers I've ever seen on a cultivated Nepenthes. (And by the way, there's a mistake in that Wikipedia article. The nickname for Nepenthes is in fact "monkey cup," but it's not because monkeys drink out of them. Inside a pitcher plant is a disgusting stew of digestive juices, and rotting and partially digested bugs. Nobody would want to drink that crap, not even a monkey. Monkeys do, however, look into pitcher plants and fish out any fresh bugs that have just fallen in, and eat them. I'll correct the entry when I'm feeling ambitious. I am such a resource for useless information.)
In only barely related news, I'm disgusted with Petco. I stopped by there this afternoon to pick up some crickets for my plants, and some mealworms for Orion. (He's doing a science project about mealworms and how well they can walk on various kinds of surfaces. Of course, he's not going to harm the mealies in any way. In fact, he's quite taken with them. He wants to keep them when his experiment is done and watch their life cycle, until they turn into beetles. Then he'll probably want to keep them forever and give them all names.)
So anyway. I go to the reptile section of the store, where I figure the mealworms are. There they sit, in the little tubs they've been selling mealworms in since the dawn of time. Well, since I was a kid at least. The only thing was, I could smell the reek of dead mealworms from three feet away. (If you've never smelled them, dead mealworms are FOUL.) I started inspecting the tubs. They had dates on them. Some of the dates were in JANUARY. I opened some of the older boxes, and sure enough, they were full of dead, rotten, dessicated worms. The tubs dated at the beginning of February had about half of the worms dead. There was a stack of boxes dated in the middle of February, and those were the newest ones. Hardy little boogers that they were, only a few of those guys were dead.
I found the whole thing horrifying. Basically, they were getting shipments of worms, dropping 24 of them in a tub, and setting them out for sale with no food or water. If they get bought, fine. If they don't, then they starve and thirst to death. I'm sorry, but that is MESSED UP.
Obviously, I'm not opposed to feeding bugs to pets, or plants, or whatever. But just because they're destined to be food doesn't mean they have to be treated so inhumanely.
I took my tub of mealworms up to the counter, and told the pimply young clerk how disgusted I was by the condition of the worms. He stammered something or another, obvously baffled and flustered. There was no manager on deck to talk to. I'm going to send an email to their corporate headquarters. There's just no excuse for that crap.
When we got the poor mealies home and dumped them into the little plastic habitat we bought for them, they seemed lively enough. Orion sliced off a couple of pieces of apple for them, and put a little water in a bottle cap. The worms instantly popped out of their sawdust and started greedily eating the apples. They were chomping so hard you could actually hear them. Some of the other worms were clustered around the bottle cap, sucking down water as fast as they could. In theory, mealworms don't need a water source other than fruit. But these guys were so dehydrated they were drinking like camels. It was really pretty pathetic.
I'm not a huge fan of stores that sell pets in the first place. There are things about Petco that I like. They don't sell dogs or cats, and they have regular adoption events. But obviously, there's room for improvement.
Okay, go ahead. Call me a bleeding-heart worm hugger. But I think all living things deserve to be treated wtih at least a little dignity and respect.
Maybe I should go to bed now. I'm on a soapbox. About worms. Dear God...
Not that cleaning and organizing is a bad thing. But I still get tired really, really easily, and my doc warned me about not overdoing it. So I've started setting a kitchen timer and cleaning for 15 minutes at a time, every few hours. If I don't set the timer, I get really embedded in a task, and it somehow expands to three hours. (I need to straighten out the kitchen counter, which means I need to put the cereal boxes back in the cabinet, which means I need to go through all the cereal and dump the stale stuff into a bag for my mom's chickens, which means I need to scrub out the cereal keeper boxes before I refill them with fresh cereal, which means I need to do the rest of the dishes, which means I think my cabinet is too crowded so I need to take everything out of it and donate some chipped and ill-used glassware, and so on and so on and so on.)
The last time I got this psycho about cleaning, I was pregnant and "nesting." Since it's physically impossible that I'm pregnant now, I can only guess that I'm nesting for myself and my family. Trying to make everything clean and shiny and new so that we can all be healthy and have a good start to the spring. Or something. It's weird.
I even transplanted my carnivorous plants into a bigger, roomier terrarium today. Levi, my big Nepenthes, had totally outgrown the old one. I took enormous pleasure in sticking my hands in the dirt. I'm not well enough to garden outside just yet, but at least I got to do a little indoor gardening. Levi's looking great--he has some of the biggest pitchers I've ever seen on a cultivated Nepenthes. (And by the way, there's a mistake in that Wikipedia article. The nickname for Nepenthes is in fact "monkey cup," but it's not because monkeys drink out of them. Inside a pitcher plant is a disgusting stew of digestive juices, and rotting and partially digested bugs. Nobody would want to drink that crap, not even a monkey. Monkeys do, however, look into pitcher plants and fish out any fresh bugs that have just fallen in, and eat them. I'll correct the entry when I'm feeling ambitious. I am such a resource for useless information.)
In only barely related news, I'm disgusted with Petco. I stopped by there this afternoon to pick up some crickets for my plants, and some mealworms for Orion. (He's doing a science project about mealworms and how well they can walk on various kinds of surfaces. Of course, he's not going to harm the mealies in any way. In fact, he's quite taken with them. He wants to keep them when his experiment is done and watch their life cycle, until they turn into beetles. Then he'll probably want to keep them forever and give them all names.)
So anyway. I go to the reptile section of the store, where I figure the mealworms are. There they sit, in the little tubs they've been selling mealworms in since the dawn of time. Well, since I was a kid at least. The only thing was, I could smell the reek of dead mealworms from three feet away. (If you've never smelled them, dead mealworms are FOUL.) I started inspecting the tubs. They had dates on them. Some of the dates were in JANUARY. I opened some of the older boxes, and sure enough, they were full of dead, rotten, dessicated worms. The tubs dated at the beginning of February had about half of the worms dead. There was a stack of boxes dated in the middle of February, and those were the newest ones. Hardy little boogers that they were, only a few of those guys were dead.
I found the whole thing horrifying. Basically, they were getting shipments of worms, dropping 24 of them in a tub, and setting them out for sale with no food or water. If they get bought, fine. If they don't, then they starve and thirst to death. I'm sorry, but that is MESSED UP.
Obviously, I'm not opposed to feeding bugs to pets, or plants, or whatever. But just because they're destined to be food doesn't mean they have to be treated so inhumanely.
I took my tub of mealworms up to the counter, and told the pimply young clerk how disgusted I was by the condition of the worms. He stammered something or another, obvously baffled and flustered. There was no manager on deck to talk to. I'm going to send an email to their corporate headquarters. There's just no excuse for that crap.
When we got the poor mealies home and dumped them into the little plastic habitat we bought for them, they seemed lively enough. Orion sliced off a couple of pieces of apple for them, and put a little water in a bottle cap. The worms instantly popped out of their sawdust and started greedily eating the apples. They were chomping so hard you could actually hear them. Some of the other worms were clustered around the bottle cap, sucking down water as fast as they could. In theory, mealworms don't need a water source other than fruit. But these guys were so dehydrated they were drinking like camels. It was really pretty pathetic.
I'm not a huge fan of stores that sell pets in the first place. There are things about Petco that I like. They don't sell dogs or cats, and they have regular adoption events. But obviously, there's room for improvement.
Okay, go ahead. Call me a bleeding-heart worm hugger. But I think all living things deserve to be treated wtih at least a little dignity and respect.
Maybe I should go to bed now. I'm on a soapbox. About worms. Dear God...