Month 10: Pest-capade

I know I originally started this blog to write about my experiences as a new mother, and to record all the memorable and cute stories / antics / pictures as Xuan grows up. Little did I know that I would be writing about pests. No, I am not talking about Xuan...although she was dressed up as a ladybug, my baby is not a pest, she is too adorable to be a pest. Part of being a stay at home mother / housewife includes having to deal with household pests.



One morning, I woke up and opened the master bathroom door to discover several little greyish squiggly worms crawling around the bathtub. Thinking nothing about it, I ran the shower to wash them down the drain. A couple of hours later, I went back into the bathroom and noticed a sour-ish smell. Having a bad feeling, I pulled aside the shower curtain, and saw that there were even more of those creepy crawlies in the bathtub! I started to wonder where were they coming from? Were they crawling up from the shower drainage hole? I washed them down the drain again, and covered the drainage hole.


Later in the afternoon, I went into the master bathroom, and found the sour-ish stench even stronger. And now there were dozens of those foul creatures in the bathtub and several were even on the floor crawling towards the door! Yucks! The first thought that came into my head was to kill these slugs before they crawled into our bedroom and attacked Xuan. Though, in all probability she would just pinch one up and put it into her mouth! Mega yucks!!


I took a can of insecticide and started spraying the worms, but they still continued crawling. Then I took the bathroom cleaner, which had bleach and liberally doused each individual worm but they still squirmed around. Finally, thinking that the slugs might be leeches, I took a container of salt from the kitchen and buried each creature under a mound of salt. To my horror, they still wriggled, but then slowly stopped after a while. Just in case, they were playing dead, I barricaded the inside of the bathroom door with a line of salt one inch high as a deterrent for them to go into the bedroom. I moved Xuan’s bedding and our bedding to the next room and announced to H that we would be camping there until this problem was sorted out.


Obviously the problem was getting exponentially worse. I now knew that the smelly creatures were dropping into the bathroom from the roof. Where else could they be coming from, after I had already blocked the access through the drain? Putting that together with the appearance of the greyish white wriggly worms, with one end being the head waving in the air, accompanied with the foul stench, I had a pretty good idea what our problem was.


The next day, I called a pest control company and asked if they dealt with removal of a dead animal carcass in the roof infested with maggots. Thankfully they said that they did. I do not know what we would do if they didn’t! That day, someone came from the pest control company to take a look, and they confirmed what I suspected, that a large rat or cat had died in the roof rafters, and the maggots feeding on the dead carcass were dropping from the roof into the bathroom. The next day, the pest control folks came to open up the roof, remove the cat carcass, sprayed antiseptic and deodorizer in the roof and bathroom to kill the maggots and remove the stench, and clean up the bathroom.


Needless to say, I insisted on camping in the second bedroom for at least 2 weeks and I cleaned the bathroom at least 3 times before we moved back into the master bedroom.


I have heard of stories about household pests, and even lived through some myself, but I really think this maggot thing wins hands down as the most traumatizing experience. Just for comparison, I will list down some other pest-capades down here, and you can take a vote, or even add some horrors stories of your own.


Termite City
This happened at H’s first house. We were not living there as he was away travelling every week. I was staying at my mom’s place. We were renovating our current house and used his first house to store some of our furniture and belongings. After the renovation was completed, we planned to move our things to the new house and sell the old house. Unfortunately, we had the termite attack before we could move.


Apparently, termites just love empty houses, as we found out after going to check on the house after a couple of months. Everything looked fine, but when we went into the kitchen and opened a drawer, we got the fright of our lives. The drawer looked like a scene from a horror movie. It was filled with what looked like a mass of dried twigs that were pulsing and teeming with termites. When H opened the other drawers and cabinets (I was standing at the far end of the kitchen), we found the same thing, the termites had devoured the entire kitchen cabinet and formed mud tunnels everywhere. They say that termites always have a main nest that is their colony outside, well, our kitchen sure looked like the termites were setting up a satellite city.


We had the whole house treated for termites, and the kitchen cabinet had to be rebuilt. Thank goodness the renovation for the new house was almost completed and we could move shortly after that. I spend several days researching termites to ensure we won’t be accidentally moving some lone termites embedded in our wooden furniture to the new house. I didn’t want to start a new termite nest in our new house and have the termites devour the house around our ears! It seems that termites cannot survive when they are cut off from their colony, good riddance!


Sneaky Snakes
Within a space of 1 year, we had 3 snakes break into our new home. The first time, it happened at the back of the house and I noticed the snake crawling into our house. I screamed and the snake quickly turned around and started crawling back out. The firemen came with a 2 meter snake pole used for catching pythons (typically 5 cm in diameter and 3 meters long)...perhaps I didn’t quite tell them on the phone that it was a little bitty snake about 1 cm in diameter and only 3 feet long. The firemen actually laughed when they finally spotted the snake in the drain and caught it with their hands. Still, they did say that this type of snake was poisonous, but not when it was that small.


The second time it happened, I was staying overnight at the hospital when I was pregnant. H had just come home from the hospital when he saw the snake at the sink. Again he called the firemen to come catch the snake. The third snake break in happened at the front of the house when I was 4 months pregnant. We just reached home after dinner and I walked into the house, and when I turned around, I saw the snake at the base of the shoe cupboard. I screamed, and that resulted in the snake squeezing into the first crack it could find, right into the base of our built in shoe cupboard. H was not going to call the firemen to break down his new built in cupboard, so either the snake sneaked out later that night, or we have a perfectly preserved fossil specimen behind the built ins. The next people to buy our house and decide to demolish the built ins to have new ones put in would get a little surprise!


Leisure Suit Larry the Lizard
When I was a kid, a giant lizard used to live in our storeroom. This is no ordinary house lizard. This lizard was almost one foot in length, from head to tail and it’s body was 2 inches thick at the fattest point. It was grey in colour, with little blue spots. I refused to go into the storeroom for months, there were just too many hiding places for that giant lizard to hide and scare the living daylights out of me.


Crocodile Dundee
My sister swears that she once saw a baby crocodile in our toilet bowl. She said it was splashing around inside. I didn’t see it myself, my mom flushed it down the toilet. True or not, for a while after that, I think my sister checked the toilet each time before she sat down...no one wants to get bitten on the derriere!


Bird Central
My friend has a case of house attack from birds. Little sparrows would rest on his porch and greet him singing songs as he went off to work. Aww...how sweet you say...not so sweet when you have to clean up the bird shit off the floor. So one day he smeared rat glue all over their favourite perch, and one sparrow got stuck. And so every morning after that, my friend would go to work with one mummified sparrow giving him the evil eye. The other sparrows learned to stay away.


Kerokeropi
Another friend of mine has a lovely fish pond by the side of his house. The fish pond had fishes, and lotus pads. The lotus pads attracted some unwanted visitors, bullfrogs. Bullfrogs would come sit on the lotus pads. I thought the bullfrogs would be come in handy as they could eat the mosquitoes, but my friend found them really irritating. Perhaps I should send one of my snakes to his house to take care of his bullfrogs!


Who said you need to live in a haunted house to get freaked out? Do you have any pest-capades to share?