Today, being Good Friday, you'd think I'd give myself a bit of a break and take the day off. But no. Besides, my husband has been in the office since 7am. He's a hard act to follow, that man. (I am woman, hear me raw.)
He, however, was lucky enough to hit the sack early. I was still cleaning at midnight.
We'd had small moths fluttering around in the pantry for a while now. I thought I'd found the offending packet of flour that these pesky little creatures had been breeding in. But as the weeks went by, the moths' siblings - in the pre-morphed guise of little grubs - would appear on the walls and shelves of the pantry. The Buddhist in me removed the cute little fellas and flicked them outside... However, as their numbers multiplied in plague proportions, I became very Stalin-esque and killed the buggers with either a spray of pressurised venom or the mean and hard swipe of a wet dishcloth.
One day last week I returned home to a proud and domesticated husband and stepson: they had 'cleaned all the maggot things out of the pantry'.
Maggots? Great. We've got a pantry full of maggots.
“They’re not maggots, they’re grubs. Caterpillars,” I said, rather indignantly. (What kind of a house has maggots in their pantry?) It was time to take serious action.
My daughter Kate googled 'pantry grubs' and came up with something much more palatable than Steve's maggot theory: our pantry was infested with Indian Meal Moths.
Even though our eight-bedroomed house is larger than most, our pantry isn't and nor is our kitchen. This made the job of emptying and cleaning the entire pantry a mammoth and marathon task. And as fast as I emptied, washed and sprayed each shelf, the little critters would reappear, seemingly out of nowhere. It was a never ending battle between girl and grub. Eventually, I won.
The chooks are now bloated with dried fruit and nuts and the paddocks are full of gluttonous magpies, still trying to peck their way through tossed biscuits. The recycling bins are overflowing with paper and cardboard, the dishwasher is exhausted from endless loads of Tupperware washing, and my rubber gloves are soggy and limp. Not unlike me.
But the pantry looks beautiful. Pristine. Sparse. Like it belongs to a family of two, not eleven.
And then this morning as I began my Friday Post story (which wasn’t going to be about pantry cleaning!) my daughter came to tell me the bad news: she'd found another Indian Meal Moth holding up its rude finger as it climbed the pantry wall.
So as today marks the crucifixion and death of Jesus, it also marks the death and crucifixion (because I’m very, very cross) of the Indian Meal Moth in Wattle Glen.
Good Friday for us. Bad Friday for them.
He, however, was lucky enough to hit the sack early. I was still cleaning at midnight.
We'd had small moths fluttering around in the pantry for a while now. I thought I'd found the offending packet of flour that these pesky little creatures had been breeding in. But as the weeks went by, the moths' siblings - in the pre-morphed guise of little grubs - would appear on the walls and shelves of the pantry. The Buddhist in me removed the cute little fellas and flicked them outside... However, as their numbers multiplied in plague proportions, I became very Stalin-esque and killed the buggers with either a spray of pressurised venom or the mean and hard swipe of a wet dishcloth.
One day last week I returned home to a proud and domesticated husband and stepson: they had 'cleaned all the maggot things out of the pantry'.
Maggots? Great. We've got a pantry full of maggots.
“They’re not maggots, they’re grubs. Caterpillars,” I said, rather indignantly. (What kind of a house has maggots in their pantry?) It was time to take serious action.
My daughter Kate googled 'pantry grubs' and came up with something much more palatable than Steve's maggot theory: our pantry was infested with Indian Meal Moths.
Even though our eight-bedroomed house is larger than most, our pantry isn't and nor is our kitchen. This made the job of emptying and cleaning the entire pantry a mammoth and marathon task. And as fast as I emptied, washed and sprayed each shelf, the little critters would reappear, seemingly out of nowhere. It was a never ending battle between girl and grub. Eventually, I won.
The chooks are now bloated with dried fruit and nuts and the paddocks are full of gluttonous magpies, still trying to peck their way through tossed biscuits. The recycling bins are overflowing with paper and cardboard, the dishwasher is exhausted from endless loads of Tupperware washing, and my rubber gloves are soggy and limp. Not unlike me.
But the pantry looks beautiful. Pristine. Sparse. Like it belongs to a family of two, not eleven.
And then this morning as I began my Friday Post story (which wasn’t going to be about pantry cleaning!) my daughter came to tell me the bad news: she'd found another Indian Meal Moth holding up its rude finger as it climbed the pantry wall.
So as today marks the crucifixion and death of Jesus, it also marks the death and crucifixion (because I’m very, very cross) of the Indian Meal Moth in Wattle Glen.
Good Friday for us. Bad Friday for them.
PS Like my 'moth art' above? It's one of the dead critters I found in the fluoro pantry light.
1 comment:
Mmmm, better to be a fly on your wall rather than an Indian Meal Moth!! Happy Easter all you happy mob around that table!
love
Sheryl
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