Assorted Bugs

For the past month or so, I've been trying to kill a colony of sugar ants that's decided my kitchen is the 'it' place to be. It's my fault it has been taking so long. I put the Terro bait down for a few days, then, as soon as I don't see any ants, move on. In the meantime, the little critters are back under the cabinet regrouping, and we repeat the process a few days later, as soon as I notice them crawling across the floor, getting into the cat food again.

I feel a bit silly about it, but part of the reason I've been lax is because, with all the unbalance going on the the world, it seems somehow unfair of me to kill the ants. I'm way bigger than they are,  and I feel like a mean executioner killing them off because I don't like where they've decided to make their nest.

I gotta admit, I've killed off many an ant colony with nary a second thought. Feeling sympathy for them is new to me. I blame the COVID years.

But, it turns out, I haven't gone totally loony. My sympathy for the lives of bugs is limited to what they're working to destroy. 

I went outside yesterday morning to remove the latest group of black-spotted leaves from my beleaguered rose bushes, only to find a bunch of Japanese beetles had moved in and turned a number of the remaining leaves to lace. And. And! They decimated the one flower the bush has managed to produce anyways, despite the fact it is down to fewer than half its leaves since the black spot returned with a vengeance.

Not on my watch!

I immediately marched back inside for a cup of soapy water, and knocked all the bugs I could find off of their perches and into the cup, where they quickly drowned. I grimaced when I missed the cup, only to watch the bug sail away across the yard to freedom. Not only did I feel zero ounces of sympathy for the bugs I killed, I left my cup outside, where it would be handy when I returned an hour or so later to see if any of the escaped bugs were unwary enough to return.

Mess with my roses, will you!

Shower Repair

Six years ago, when we tiled the shower, we made a mistake. We cut the bottom course of tiles on the back wall level across, instead of following the slope of the floor. We didn't think the gap would be noticeable once we'd filled it with the Tile Shop-approved-color-matched caulk. We were wrong.

It looked good for about a month, then the caulk got dirty and couldn't be cleaned, and it's been bugging me ever since. It's clearly not been a high priority on the fix-it list, but after one of the little black diamond floor tiles came loose last month, I decided it was time to tackle the repair.

Of course, of course, once I got into it, it couldn't be just the one tile that had lost its adhesion. Nope, about fifteen of the floor mosaic tiles came up in all. But those wall tiles that had been bugging me for years?  Their adhesion was beyond solid, and I ended up tearing up the backboard before they'd come loose. Figures.

To my surprise, thus far into the project, my time and effort estimate was right about where I'd anticipated it would be - rare when speaking of my home-improvement projects. I'd only broken one extra tile, and the backboard damage was easily repaired with a coat of thin set. I was starting to feel like I might know what I was doing!

Then, I replaced the grout. Grouting is usually the easy part. It's hard to break things while grouting, and I figured, since I had all the supplies out, I could replace the grout that had failed elsewhere in the bathroom and the kitchen floors. What the heck. I got the cracks cleaned out without trouble, mixed up the goo, and troweled it into place. I'd stored the leftover grout powder from the original project in a temperature controlled space in a moisture resistant container, and it all still looked properly dry-groutish when I opened the tin, so I thought it would still be usable. I thought wrong.

I'd gotten all the work done with a single batch of grout. The next day, some of it was setting up as expected, but to my dismay, the grout in a few of the joints had instead turned to powder. What!!??!! Off to the Tile Shop I went, to see what I'd done wrong this time. They didn't have to think long at all, and told me grout has a shelf life of about three years. My bag had been sitting for six, and apparently when the stuff sits for too long, it starts to separate out, and the powdery parts just didn't have enough glue to hold together.

*sigh*

I guess the good news is that it's easy to determine which parts are OK, and which have gone bad. If you touch it with a knife and it turns to powder, that's the bad stuff. If the knife barely scratches the surface, you're good to go. And, the part where it turns to powder will make it easy to re-prep the tiles. I'm still in the dourly-glaring-at-the-mess stage of moving forward, but it shouldn't be too long before I regather my oomph and redo the bad grout.

It's a small setback, not a failure. 
Live and Learn.

Black Spot

The roses in my backyard struggle.

When I selected the bushes five years ago, my criteria, in descending order of importance, were: climbing, disease resistant, fragrance, then color. The first two years, I thought I'd done well - they got established, started growing, and produced a beautiful array of fragrant peach-colored blossoms.

Then, the disease gods struck, and I went out one day to find the leaves covered in black spots. The first year, I used some commercial fungal treatment with some degree of success. But then, to my dismay, I was told the product made the flowers toxic for the bees. The bees are important to me, so off the list that stuff went.

Well, if you're not going to use the anti-fungal stuff, the only remedy recommended by the internet is to pick off the diseased leaves, and then hope for the best, which is what I've done the last two summers. 

It's kind of hard to watch. The bushes are hardy, and as long as I'm diligent about pulling off the diseased leaves, they've been right behind me, shooting out new leaves. But after a short time, the fungus affects those new leaves, and the whole process repeats.

This year, the bushes started out with vigor, covered with healthy green leaves and beautiful flowers. Then, the rain and the heat came in together, and (I think) reactivated the fungus, and I've been back out there this week, my heart breaking just a little, beginning the process of pulling off leaves for a third year.

My landscape architect friend has watched all this with some dismay. She's one of the best plant people I know, and even she just shook her head when she stopped by one day. She recommended I just give the plants a shovel-upgrade. (i.e. Let nature do what it's gonna do, and just dig them up and replace them.)

I've given her suggestion a lot of thought, she does know of which she speaks, but I haven't had the heart to follow through, at least not yet.

The bushes have become a physical metaphor for me; they represent my fears surrounding all the hard stuff in the news. Wars are looming, disease is still rampant, we've missed the window (I fear) on climate control - and those are just the top three. It's bleak, but I'm not ready to give up yet.

Where there's life, there's hope. As long as my bushes are willing to fight the good fight, I'll do all I can to help them along. As long as there are people in the world willing to fight back against fear, I'm on their side. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, it's a lot harder to know what to do for the latter.  

The bushes are easy. As long as they have enough oomph to produce new leaves, I will pull off the diseased ones. And should they run out of oomph, I will be able to hold tight to the memory of the beauty they brought to my little corner of the world while they were here.

Knowing what bit I can do to save the world is harder. But I'll keep working, in the small ways I work, to help Good as best I can, because I can.

Bedbugs - Maybe Gone? For Real This Time!

I started my latest outwit-the-bedbugs campaign back in January, this is June. In between, I’ve gone over to Kevin’s place every week that I could (that’s all but about three of them), and vacuumed the floor and washed down the walls around his bed (to clean up the bits of blood; i.e. bug poop). I've inspected the bed and surrounding area for signs of activity, killing all the bugs I could find. I made him wash his sheets and keep the area around the bed clear of stuff.

I wanted to make him do the work, but every time I talked to him about it, I could tell he wouldn’t do it. Maybe it was too complicated? Physically, he is no longer agile, and doesn’t bend well, and there isn’t a lot of space to move stuff around, so the cleaning is difficult. He also couldn't quite comprehend why I was doing what I was doing. He didn’t believe it would make any difference, and doesn’t do things he doesn’t want to do; things that don't make sense to him. (I hate to say this, but I really think he'd have let himself get put back on the street rather than do the weekly cleanings - brain injuries are weird...)

The first week I cleaned, I found a LOT of bugs. Ignoring his protestations, I made him get rid of all the cardboard boxes in the bedroom, along with all but the most vital of contents, which I thoroughly inspected and encased in plastic before setting aside. I was encouraged when, the following week, I found fewer bugs. The next, even fewer, until the last three weekly trips, when I found bug tracks, but no actual bugs in the traps or on his bed. Progress!

As time ground on, my fear of the bugs has lessened. It turns out they’re not like wood ticks or fleas. They don’t try to get to you as long as you’re awake and moving. They really just want to eat, then be left alone to digest their meal. And they don't want to travel far to eat - they prefer to live within a few feet of the restaurant. As I was cleaning and would find them, they'd never come at me. They’d either try to walk away, or sit there in one spot, hoping to be overlooked. (I did my best not to overlook any…) 

My peace of mind was helped along by the cooperation of the building manager. She gave me access to her private bathroom, so I could change clothes and towel down when I'd finished each day. After I changed, I put the clothes I'd been wearing into ziplock bags, so I was able to greatly reduce the risk of carrying hitchhikers home.

And, each week, when I was done cleaning, I’d stop down and talk to her. I'd report what I'd found, and see if she'd scheduled a new heat treatment yet. Each week, I was able to tell her I’d been able to lower the bug population with what I was doing, but also told her I would not be able to eliminate them without professional assistance. 

After the first month, when I kept coming back, she sorta listened to me, and scheduled in another chemical treatment. (I think I wore her down.) She’d hired a new bug treatment company at the start of the year, and it's a vast improvement - the new people actually try to track down and actually treat the bugs, as opposed to just spraying some goop around the middle of the room, the way the other company did. They went so far as to pull the baseboard off the walls so they could better treat behind them, once it was clear that was one of the places the bedbugs were nesting.

The chemical treatment helped, but I still found evidence of the infestation week after week. I'd go on over, clean the place up, report what I'd found, repeat. I gotta admit, I got tired of the routine long before she got tired of me stopping by every Tuesday morning with my weekly report. But, once it became clear I wasn't going to go away, she finally relented and got approval to get the company to do another heat treatment.

A couple of weeks ago, after the treatment, I gave the place one more cleaning, hoping that maybe, finally, I could close this chapter of my Kevin story. (It’s not one of my favorite chapters. It's too long, and is repetitive and tedious.) 

I went back this last week to find…. NO evidence of active bedbugs! No bugs in the traps around the legs of the bed. No new bug poop spots on the walls. No shed skins, no sign of eggs. First time ever.

This time, I’m going to give it a month before I go back. I really, really, really (that’s three reallys) hope, when I return, I will again find no evidence of bugs. If I do, I will continue to do what I’ve been doing. It’s working, and sooner or later, I am determined to win this war. I refuse to be bested by a bunch of shy bugs.