Move over Pokemon Go, we’ve got a new game in town!
It so happens that I quit my job so I could kill fruit flies. Here is what I’ve been spending all my time on, in descending order:
– Killing fruit flies
– Setting traps for fruit flies
– Investigating how to eradicate fruit flies
– Kids care, schedules, feeding, miscellaneous everyday life chores
– Staring at my list of things to do, giving up and napping
Let me explain. This hot summer of 2016 in Austin we made the mistake of forgetting a ripe banana in my daughter’s backpack. And it’s all gone downhill from there.
What then escalated the apocalypse was my husband left some ripe plums on the countertop about a week ago. We’re typically not this careless but here we are. We started seeing a swarm of fruit flies and so naturally we cleaned everything up and threw the plums. But it did not cease. We set up traps and whilst all that cleaning we discovered the rotting banana in the old backpack which we discarded right away with relief. Finally, it would stop we thought. But we were wrong.
By now we had 4 to 5 traps strategically set up in the house. We were also wielding a fly zapping racquet. My forehand could not get any better at this point. I decided to work on my backhand now. The flies were dropping down like errr flies but around this point, they started resisting all the traps and weapons we had in place for them.
Things were not looking good. Most family and friends had the same few recommendations.
– Just put some apple cider vinegar and leave it out
– Put some red wine and leave it out
– Put some traps around ripe fruit and leave it out
We left them all out and more to no avail. ‘They’ll be gone. Winter is coming’ my husband said with a grin. I did not laugh.
I was getting hysterical and mildly paranoid by this point. If you came home you would find me looking disheveled, sleep deprived, eyes nervously following real and imagined flies all around the house with a racquet in hand. I am not even feigning listening to anything you say and even the kids are now part of this morbid game, more than excited their house has turned into some form of hunting grounds. I wanted to fumigate the place, burn it down or buy a new house immediately. The bloody buggers were driving me crazy.
It was time to call the big guns. My husband called Pest Control because he was afraid he would have to buy a new home or seek asylum from his crazy wife.
He said what I didn’t want to hear. Wait it out, since you found the source and they seem to be dying down. It’s only a matter of time. I stopped cooking, eating at home and spent most of the day outside with kids. My husband assured me that they were diminishing in number but it had gone too far. I was irrevocably scarred and would not tolerate nor had the patience to wait till every last one of them was out of my house forever.
And then we had guests and I was forced to deal with living in my house. No one noticed them anymore and were quite convinced I was imagining them. I thought I saw a couple but no one believed me.
So after all that drama, the household is back to normal. No more pesky fruit flies in the house. As for me, well, define normal?
Here are a few helpful links if you ever need it:
http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/cleaning/tips/a25042/how-to-kill-fruit-flies/
http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/shopping-storing/how-to-get-rid-fruit-flies
