Flying By the Seat of My Pants!

Flies, flies! "Lord of the Flies" is playing daily in my house!

If not that, then at least auditions are being held daily for the remake of this old cult favorite. Many flies are auditioning

Hundreds daily.

At first I thought maybe my adorable little chickens brought this Egyptian plague number 4 to my door but no!

I visited a neighbor with no chickens and she had the same audition crew at her house.

As did a town mouse friend I called

Turns out we have had the perfect storm of scorching hot days followed by sky drenching rains that make our front doors (and side doors - and car doors etc) look like the welcome center for fly-ville.

Lest you think I am squeamish about the occasional fly let me give you some chamber of horrors statistics..

In one hour in my kitchen I killed 10 flies. Given that I can hardly ride a bicycle or play any ball sports whatsoever because I have zero eye hand coordination, means there must have been at least 3 times that number of actual flies for me to hit the ones I did. I am very serious. I once saw two flies getting their groove on ON my white kitchen tiled floor and I still managed to miss both of them when I swatted!

So realizing that this was a well planned Orwellian invasion of my world I took counter measures. I perused the local hardware store and found these.

They come with a nice handy dandy red tab that you pull and out spirals this incredibly sticky tape



I brought them home and prepared to hang them, feeling yes... I will admit it... like I had just taken one more step into complete redneck ville. A place I have been avoiding with a passion for the last 20 odd years since I moved to the vast expanses of the country.

At first I thought that the fact that the fly tape merrily dangling in my kitchen like some DEET type of mistletoe wasn't attracting flies was because the light was on

so I turned it off

Still no flies were attracted to it

instead, auditions were still going strong on the counter top

I did notice the fly strip swaying when the air conditioner came on

that's it! I thought!

They think it is a pinata~
So I moved it to a corner

unfortunately a corner that I store dishes in

so I got tangled in it twice in the course of making dinner.

Its good sticky stuff that's all we need to say

after a day and a morning of no flies going anywhere near it, I decided to move it to the green room.

I'm using TV/ film jargon here as my room is actually red - not green but is right by the door where the flies were lining up, just like TV stars before they go on camera.

I stuck the barren fly tape up right by the door and over a window which at least 5 flies were mistaking for an exit


two day later


Do you see it?


That one fly?

Yep.

You got it!

After all that, money spent ($3.00's) and time wasted looking like I was the biggest rednecker evah....

we got ONE fly. Meanwhile I had killed about 30,000 or maybe 30 at least with this





I do not know the precise moral of this story.....

Perhaps there is none.

All I know is that it finally rained and somehow

miraculously, all the flies are gone.

For now.