spugbrap’s blog

Last night, when I was taking the trash out, I noticed that the trash can in the garage was making a lot of noise. As I went to pull the drawstrings on the trash bag, I saw little worms crawling around the outer edge of the bag. Upon further inspection, I noticed that there were hundreds more crawling around inside the bag. Then I realized what they were: MAGGOTS!

So, I went about trying to kill them. I had a can of Lysol Disinfectant Spray with me, so I tried that first. I sprayed it all over the top of the trash bag, and sprayed a good bit into the trash bag, as well. At that point, I noticed that there were some crawling around on the floor, too. So, I sprayed them as well. But, that didn’t phase them one bit. They kept right on crawling. I carefully grabbed the trash bag and ran it outside to the curb (good thing it was trash night!). Then, I scanned the garage for anything that might kill bugs.

The next poison I saw was a spray bottle of Lysol All-Purpose Cleaner. I assumed that it was stronger stuff than the aerosol spray can I had just used, so I decided to try it on the bugs. I could almost hear them laughing, as they kept on crawling, sometimes walking directly through big puddles of it, when they could have easily gone around. They just didn’t care. By this time, there were about 20 of them crawling around on the floor (that I could see). I had to use something specifically designed to kill bugs.

So, I ran inside and grabbed a can of RAID. The can we had handy did not say anything about maggots or flies on the label, but I hoped it might work better than nothing. So I sprayed it all over the floor, wherever I saw maggots. I made bigger puddles wherever there were several of them close together. They didn’t seem to mind, and just kept going about their business. By now, I’d seen them crawling under a nearby pile of wood, and more seemed to be crawling out, than were crawling in. Either way, this showed me that they were not only resilient little bastards, but that they were probably already well established in every nearby dark place/crevice. I was freaking out, now, because they seemed to be multiplying, right before my eyes. I could see probably 40 of them, at that point.

Next, I called Lacey, and asked her to look up how to kill maggots. She read about a lot of things that DON’T work, and then found some things that supposedly had worked for some people:

- Products containing permethrin

- Boiling water

- Bleach

I looked around the garage, some more, and found a can of pesticide, in a powder form. A quick glance at the ingredients confirmed that it did have the chemical I was hoping for: permethrin! So I started shaking the powder everywhere I could see the maggots, and also tried to make a barrier around the area that I had been treating thus far, to try and contain them. Somehow, it did not come as much of a surprise when they kept right on crawling, through pools and piles of 4 different poisons.

This was really testing my sanity. I kept worrying that they were on my shoes, or might have grabbed onto the bottom of my pants legs. The barrier didn’t work at all. They were branching out in every direction, at this point. Everywhere I looked, I saw maggots. I could probably see close to 100 of them, at this point, and I knew that there were lots more that I couldn’t see. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, they were nearly invisible. Their coloring was a perfect match to my concrete garage floor. Without their constant wiggling, I might not have even noticed them. I felt helpless and defeated. But I still had one trick to try: bleach.

I grabbed a huge bottle of bleach, that just happened to be within arm’s reach, and started pouring it on them. I was a little worried about the fact that I was mixing so many harmful chemicals together, but I was much more concerned about killing these evil maggots. They kept right on crawling, though! UGH! Lacey had said something about bleach taking a half hour to kill them, though, so I tried to be patient. The maggots were continuing to expand, and to hide underneath every box, piece of wood, etc. I tried to move a few things out of the way, so I could pour bleach in more places, but I’m pretty sure that every time I moved something, it just helped them spread (because they were already crawling on everything).

Uh-oh, the bleach-pesticide-pesticide-cleaner-disinfectant mix was now working its way across the garage. Apparently the garage slightly slopes so that liquid runs towards the outside driveway. But we’ve got all kinds of bikes, scooters, helmets, jumpropes, baseball bats, etc. stored in the garage, some of it in cardboard boxes. I scrambled to move everything cardboard out of the way, but I was a bit too late. So I had to empty the contents of the wet cardboard boxes, before their contents got wet. Empty them where, though? Wherever I could. Stacked on top of toolboxes, bikes, shelves, plastic tubs, etc. Just had to hurry. I didn’t want this poison mixture getting all over my kids’ stuff.

Finally, I got things pretty well moved around, so the little poison rivers could proceed towards the exit. I figured this was also helping me to spread the poison around, so if the bleach did work after a while, it was already covering a wider area. It was getting very late, so I started picking up my cans of poison and putting them on a shelf. As I was doing that, I kept noticing more maggots in places that hadn’t been treated [enough] yet, so I poured more bleach on them.

I hated leaving the garage in this state, but I really needed to get to bed. I wished there was some way I could burn the tiny demon spawn, without destroying my car or house. Believe me, if I ever find a pile of these things outside, they’re going to burn. Revenge will be mine, someday. Unfortunately there was nothing more I could do, out there, so I closed the garage and prepared to go in for the night.

Before going inside, though, I shook my pants and checked my shoes for maggots. When I got inside, I watched the floor behind me as I walked, to make sure I didn’t see anything wiggling. I was very freaked out and paranoid, at that point, so I undressed slowly and carefully, putting my clothes and shoes into trash bags.

Then, I went up and took a hot shower. Every drop of water, running down my leg or through my hair, made me feel like maggots were crawling on me. I almost felt like taking a bath in bleach, but I wasn’t quite that far gone. If I had actually found maggots crawling on my skin, I might have gone to that extreme. That was one of the most unpleasant experiences I’ve ever, and I’m sure my words cannot express just how horrible it felt.

This morning, I’m feeling a lot better (sanity-wise), but am not touching the garage door until the pest control people come. So, I’m staying home today so I can ensure that these evil creatures get annihilated ASAP.

If you need to clean up cork floors, don’t use Lysol disinfectant spray. I learned this the hard way, and have yet to actually adequately recover from it.

Early one morning, a couple months ago, one of the cats pooped at the top of our stairs, on the cork floor. Since they are not my cats (they are mainly Lacey’s and Matthew’s), I’m not usually the one to clean up such a mess. But everyone was still asleep (I go to work way early), and I didn’t want the mess to get worse by having someone (cat or human) step in it and track it around the house, so I dealt with it myself.

I thought I remembered Lacey telling me that the way she cleaned that stuff up was to pick up the poop with paper towels and dispose of it, then spray the area with Lysol and wipe it off. Well, it turns out, the floors didn’t like that. It turned the sprayed area a light color, and took off the shine. It looked bad.

So, I sprayed some Pledge wood polish on it, and wiped that on, and tried to wipe off the excess. The spot looked better (not perfect, but at least it was shiny again), but now the whole area was very slippery! I wiped and wiped, with paper towels and then with rags, but all it did was make the slippery area bigger. Wood floors are slippery enough, already, and the top of the stairs is a really bad place for floors to be extra slippery!

I needed to get to work, but I didn’t want the kids (or Lacey even!) to slip and fall down the stairs, so I grabbed a bathroom rug (the kind with nonslip rubber on the bottom, that you step on when you get out of the tub/shower), and covered the entire slippery area.

Lacey told me that this is *not* the way she cleans up cat poop, and she proceeded to tell me how she actually does it. But that was a couple months ago, and I’ve already forgotten. Luckily, the cats don’t tend to poop in the wrong place anymore, although their long hair does make the occasional cling-on get dropped here or there, sometimes. Eww.

The rug is still there, today, because I don’t really know what to do about the slippery floor problem, without risking damaging the floor worse than I did originally. I actually kind of like having a soft, non-slip surface up there. It does help me know where the top of the stairs are, when going up/down in the dark. I guess it’s probably kinda tacky, though, but I tend to care more about utility/safety than aesthetics.

The cats like it too. They sleep on it every night!

(Nermel sleeping on it earlier this evening)

Yes, it’s another post about public restrooms!

Just a silly thing I noticed recently, and since I had a camera handy, I took a few pictures. The lock on the handicapped stall door in the bathroom at my work is the type that you rotate counterclockwise or clockwise to lock or unlock it, respectively. The other stalls have similar locks, but the handicapped one has a bigger handle part.

Anyways, the funny thing is that when it’s in the locked position, the big handle is just loosely balanced, there, such that its extra weight (and therefore gravity) is giving it potential energy in the downward (unlocked) direction.

Not only that, but when any of the other stall doors are opened or closed, it shakes this stall door enough to make the lock fall down and half-unlock. I haven’t sat in there long enough to see if it could eventually become completely unlocked without ever touching it directly, but I am curious. :)

See pictures below… Yes, I know the locked one is not latched. The pictures were taken to make it easy to tell which is locked and unlocked. But I labeled them anyway:

locked	unlocked

Our old refrigerator died last weekend. It died once back on Christmas Eve 2006 (the day before tons of family was to come over for Christmas dinner), but we were able to get a guy to come out and fix it that day. He explained why it was pretty much shot, and we started worrying about having to buy a new fridge. He was able to virtually put a band-aid on it, but warned us that it would definitely die soon; could be tomorrow, could be next month, you never know. We were just happy that we could still proceed with Christmas dinner as planned, and didn’t have to go drop a couple grand on a new fridge right away. Also, the guy (who was an authorized Maytag repairman) recommended against buying a Maytag when we did end up getting a new fridge.

Since then, Lacey and I have looked at refrigerators when we happened to be at stores that sell them. Lacey determined the criteria that she wanted for a new fridge, and found a nice $2300 one that fit that criteria. I took a bit of convincing, before I accepted that these criteria were really important, but eventually I was on-board. Here’s what we were looking for:

- Ice and water dispenser in the door - this provides an easy way for all of us (even the kids) to get filtered water to drink. Over the life of the fridge, the amount of use we’ll get out of it makes it worthwhile to us. I had to argue with Lacey and myself repeatedly about whether it was really worth it, though.

- The ability to open the doors enough to easily put things like pizza boxes in - due to the location of our fridge, our old one could only be opened about half-way. Every time we opened it, the door hit the wall, and while we could fit a pizza box in the fridge, it required tilting/angling it around the door shelves.

Here are a couple of pictures to show the door only opening part-way:

The first criterion eliminates the standard, old-style top-freezer refrigerators, which leaves us with side-by-sides. To get a water+ice dispenser in the door, it adds about $800+ to the price, though.

The second criterion really narrowed the field. Every side-by-side model would have the same problem, because there’s a wall on the right side of the fridge. So, we looked at a newer style, french door/bottom freezers. The door on the right still only opens half-way before hitting the wall, but the door on the left opens all the way, which means overall it opens 3/4 of the total width, rather than about 1/3 like the old fridge.

We found 3 models in that style that had the water+ice dispenser in the door. They all cost $2000+, though, which is when I really tried to make us reconsider whether the $800+ water+ice dispenser was worth it. There was a Maytag, an LG, and a Kenmore. We were skeptical of the Maytag, based on the advice of the repairman, as well as brand reliability ratings in Consumer Reports. LG is too new of a brand to have reliability ratings, but Kenmore was one of the top-rated brands, and was also a brand that the repairman had recommended. We ended up going with a Kenmore 25 cu. ft. TRIO French Door Bottom Freezer Refrigerator, from Sears.

Here are a few pictures of the new fridge!

Everything went smoothly with the cleanup/repair, and all I’ve got to do now is wait for my insurance check to come!Here’s a timeline of pictures:
12/09/2006 - pipe burst

12/13/2006 - pipe fixed, new insulation and drywall up

12/14/2006 - wall painted, carpet pad section replaced and corner patched

Thanks to the following companies for taking care of it so quickly and for earning our repeat business, at least 3 times each so far:

Contractor:
Carl Mountjoy
Mountjoy’s Remodeling
Cell: 540-379-0324 [edited 04/23/2007 to update contact info]
Email: mtjoyremodeling@aol.com

Plumber:
F.H. Furr
Phone: 703-690-1133
Website: http://www.fhfurr.com/

Carpet:
Carpet Royale and Rug
Phone: 703-330-1120
Website: http://www.carpetroyalrug.com/