Holiday's over, guys!

We've been privileged this January to be hosts to a bunch of smallish flies (not tiny ones) who apparently think they're spending their holiday break either in our kitchen or lounge, or sometimes in the bathroom and sometimes in the laundry. There are only ever about half a dozen at any one time, but they lazily float around the centre of the room, refusing to go anywhere near windows or doors, and consequently not only get in your way whenever you move, but also make it irritating watching TV, because there's this subtle movement constantly being caught in your peripheral vision.

Blowflies have the sense to make a great fuss about the fact that they've somehow got themselves trapped indoors, and are eternally grateful if you open a window for them that they can actually find their way out of. Although they do seem a little lacking in brain: open a window and they'll fly smack into the closed one next to it, or sit on the glass in the open window wondering where the breeze is coming from. But at least they generally leave when requested. And they plainly have places to go and things to do, if the speed of their departure is anything to go by.

These other little flies, however, have long since outstayed their welcome - though at least they don't make any noise. Finally we made up a mix of vinegar and water to spray at them, because I don't like using normal fly sprays, especially in the kitchen. All that happened was they got wet and carried on swinging back and forth across the room drying themselves. My daughter's comment was that the only way they would die was if they drowned from excess water. This didn't seem to happen.

Last night we resorted to using a proper fly spray. There was a sudden emptiness in the middle of the room after I'd sprayed it at them, and I was sure they'd all been sent to the place where all flies go (not somewhere I'm keen to follow, incidentally). Obviously one or two missed the blast, because this morning I notice that distinct movement out of the corner of my eye. Hopefully however, they'll have the sense to realise that the Summer holidays are over and they need to go back to wherever they came from.

Update: 22.2.21

We've moved to Oamaru since I wrote this post. Oamaru is a town about an hour and half's drive from Dunedin, our former home. Here we have an ongoing problem with small flies, and in fact we got a fly net to cover the back door which is where the bulk of them were coming in from. As in Dunedin, the big blowflies, the noisy ones, will happily go out a window if you open it for them. Not the little fellows: they love to hang round making no noise, floating across the room, or landing somewhere you think you can swipe them and then whistling off at great speed...only to linger in the air again once the danger has passed. My wife is not fond of them, and even though we've used fly spray on them, it seems you have to get them dead on for it to have any effect. 

Transformed

My wife and I nearly killed ourselves on Saturday morning.

Now that the laundry has a new floor she had this idea of putting cupboards and shelves in there and a bench top, and found the ideal sort of thing (once she’s rearranged the configuration somewhat) on TradeMe for $150. Ridiculous bargain. But talk about heavy – and of course on Sat morning it drizzled solidly, and it took us two trips to get the stuff, one with a trailer on which the largest item was carried (a former pantry).

Celia was inside the car for that trip, half lying down trying to hold the other stuff from smashing through the windows. Carrying the stuff out to the car was bad enough – we had to come down and go up a steep (though not long driveway). But getting it into our house here was worse. In the end she had to unscrew the large trailer-carried item completely (in the rain) – it was too big to go through any of the doors.

However, since then she’s painted the laundry and put down the secondhand floor covering (same stuff as we've used in the bathroom –I keep thinking it’s called Vortex, but that’s not right) and put the fridge, freezer, washing machine all back in there...on her own. Tonight we’ve set up the former pantry (now chopped down to fit in with the sloping ceiling) and it’s looking great.

The room is so much better without all the clutter of pipes (they’ve all been removed and replaced with the Tub thing that we bought), and the leftover bit of concrete from the old toilet, and the horrible pink walls we’ve endured since we were foolish enough to paint them that colour (I think we hoped the colour would fade – it didn’t) and the old cistern, and the rubbish floor that was heading downhill, and the wall that divided the laundry itself from the toilet area. Plus all the junk that accumulated in there.

All in all, a transformation.

Smart dog smart phone

We spent some of yesterday trying yet another way to stop the dog digging up the seed potatoes - he likes the flavour of the blood and bone we put with them to help them get started.

Our first attempt a couple of weeks ago had been to try and surround the potato patch with a kind of fence but the wind was too strong for the material we were using. Then my older son suggested using a spray of cayenne pepper (ten parts water to one part cayenne pepper) - that kept him (the dog, not my son) away from the patch briefly. My son also suggested putting down newspaper over the patch with some sort of weights to hold the paper down. This kind of worked, except where the dog removed the paper.

Yesterday, while my grandchildren played with my wife's iphone, we tried the approach I'd suggested initially: some netting over the top of the patch that would allow the plants to grow but keep the dog from digging. It looked very successful - we even managed to reuse some very elderly wire netting that was cleared out from under the house where my wife and youngest son had pulled out the laundry floor on Friday in preparation for a new one going down.

After making some pins out of number 8 wire to hold the netting down, we felt that success had finally been achieved. Went inside to rescue the smartphone from the kids. Found later in the afternoon that the dog had chewed some of the netting (it's a material type) and got into the end of the one of the patches and....dug up a potato. Put the remaining bit of elderly wire over the broken material.

Went to my other's son's first son's birthday party (on yet another very hot day) where my son didn't have time to show my wife his newly acquired iphone mark 4 because he was busy running around after a bunch of pre-schoolers, and came home to find yet another potato had resurfaced. Dog duly told off in such terms as to make him look abashed for at least five minutes.

Pinned down the material again. Discovered that the dog has decided to use the area around the clothesline for depositing other things -the kind you walk in by accident and only discover after the smell keeps walking along with you.

Washed the dog who was also carrying around some of the same smell, and finally settled down to watch an excellent Indian movie on Maori television that I'd already seen in which true love doesn't win out, while my wife, who knew the story already, played a game that has so far defeated her, on the app on the phone that is obviously smarter than her...at least for the moment.

The Vole

Sometimes dreams are so memorable you think, This must be significant.

I woke around four this morning, decided to go to the loo (as one does) and came back and eventually went to sleep again (as one hopes to do). I dreamt that our cat got stuck out in the laundry with a vole. How I knew it was a vole I have no idea, because when I thought about it after waking, I had no picture in my memory banks of what a vole actually looks like. It certainly doesn't look like the creature that appeared in my dream. [The picture at the left is of a vole, which is something like a mouse.]

Anyway, in the dream, I went into the laundry discovered the vole in there and...went for help. The vole in the dream was about the size of a mole, but not the colour. It was furry, and possibly grey or brownish. And it seemed to be in no hurry to go anywhere.

On going for help I went back to the front of the house, which, as houses in dreams do, had expanded sufficiently for there to be a large party going on with heaps of young people, some of whom I apparently knew. I found my wife and told her about the vole, and we headed back through the house, through the kitchen, (which, like the rest of the house had become rather large, and where there was some woman in charge who was not impressed to have anyone else in her domain) and out to the laundry. There we discovered that the vole had bitten the cat's tail off. In spite of having a kind of hole where the tail should have been, the cat wasn't particularly perturbed, which even in the dream I found a little surprising.

My wife, without hesitation, picked up the vole and dumped it outside on the back steps, discovering in the process that it had a collar around its neck, as though it was someone's pet. The vole sat on the steps, no more perturbed than the cat, and obviously not inclined to head for cover.

One could go on about there being some significance in everything being larger than life (or at least larger than normal) in the dream, from the vole to the kitchen to the front room. But the largeness of things wasn't the aspect that most struck me; the vole was what seemed most interesting.

Certainly I knew the word, 'vole,' from somewhere in the past, but it's not exactly a word I'd use in everyday speech. We don't have voles in New Zealand, as far as I'm aware, and I don't think I've ever seen one anywhere. What would cause the brain to conjure up this word - and attempt to picture it in my mind (even to the extent of providing a wrong image)? Why was there such a lack of angst about the cat losing its tail? And how come the laundry was the only room in the house that didn't grow larger than usual?

Dreams are intriguing, but I don't usually get left with such an interest in them....

Spider and the Fly

A day of new experiences.
I've never been bitten by a spider before, that I know of, and I'm not even sure that I was today. But it seems likely.
I went out into our laundry this morning before work, and noticed a fly buzzing its little heart out because it was caught up in some fluffy spiderweb that was all over the upper area of the window. I don't know when the web had been put there, but I don't think it was longstanding.
Anyway, I grabbed the broom and swept over the window and the web, clearing it all away. Then I went outside, brushed the still buzzing fly off the web, and then carried on clearing away the web from the broom head. And something bit me!
I thought it might have been something sharp amongst the bristles but I've just had another look and it's just bristles - and none of them are sharp pointed. So I can only conclude that it was the spider, which, caught up in my sweeping of the window, was taking its wrath out on me.
My finger didn't balloon up, so obviously the bite wasn't particularly severe, but it stung for a while.

The photo was taken by momboleum. It's her bathroom window, not my laundry...

Shrinking Shirts

It never ceases to amaze me (though it's not hard to amaze me at the best of times) that there are so many searches on the Net for Shrinking Shirts. It's a phrase that comes up time and again on my keywords on HitTail, but it also appears daily in a Google alert I have for the topic.

You can even find video clips on You Tube on the subject. Here's a very earnest gent telling you how to stop your shirts from shrinking (and what to do about grime on your collars and cuffs).



One of the more delightful alerts I received in the last couple of days relates to a guy on Yahoo Answers asking about the problem. He asks:

I just bought a few cheap flannel shirts that fit me perfictly, but when i washed one of them it shrunk so much i could not where it anymore. I have wear them more as a light jacket, so they doen't get very dirty. Could i just throw them in the drier and skip the washing machine to semi-clean them? This would not shrink the shirt would it?

I've left his spelling as it was in the post, by the way. Fortunately he gets some very sensible answers - more so than the last person I came across on the Net who was asking something similar.

So what has all this to do with my creative work? Hmm, nothing really. It's just one of those things that interests me. And Artists Should Always Be On the Lookout for Interesting Things.