Vermin

Cleaning binge.

The pests from the restaurant have settled in.

Maybe. Again, living above AND next door to a restaurant, I am ever vigilant against invasion by the little dinosaurs. Usually, the only time I see them, is when the restaurants spray for them themselves. Then a shortlived wave of them pop up for a couple of days. I am afraid, however, that the restaurant is not spraying for them. And so instead they have simply migrated upwards in search of new housing opportunities.

Again, I don’t think I have “hundreds in my walls”. I think I have one or two successful adults running around trying to find each other. Unfortuntately, I do believe they have mated in, of all places, the underside of my refrigerator. They get water off my condenser coils, that much I understand (plus my sink and bathroom are only 3 feet away). But I am still uncertain where they are getting food. Thus, I believe they are still raiding downstairs, and then come up to my place to “escape the crowds”.

My normal management routine is Raid baits and egg-stoppers, which I swap out every 4-9 months. That, and a can of K-Rid for “spot application” (translates into “active hunting” – I do sometimes enjoy the sport) and the result is a very clean apartment. Again, until now.

So, I started last night with my bedroom. I am rearranging the furniture to allow me to pull all of it away from the walls (plus, I am vacumning and dusting – it is time for that, too) to allow an exterminator to spray around the perimeter. I am also opening all of my containers, looking for any sign of infestation, or even visitation.

Also, last night…okay, this is just plain odd. Like many bachelors, I probably don’t clean my microwave as often as I should. It is an early eighties – if even that – monster which I inherited from my dad. For all its analog controls and boxyness, it does have a large squarefootage inside. But, its also not very safe. It has huge gaps around the door – BY DESIGN! The interior has two very course opening screens, one of which is the vent. If I were standing behind the microwave, I could look straight through the outer vents into and inthrough the inner vents.

Still, I was suprised when, last night, as I was taking a bowl of chicken conqueso out of the microwave, that two or three Mouse-looking turds fell from the upper vent (none fell into the food). Now, this past winter, I knew I had a mouse in the house, and I know that city rats visit the vacant (bombed-out and non-renovated, now storeroom) apartment behind mine. I set out mouse-traps, but after coming home one evening and yelling at one as he ran around the edges of my kitchen, I hadn’t seen him/them again.

It now appears that somehow they got INSIDE the mechanicals of the microwave!

Anyway, that was another chore last night. I detailed the microwave. And, here’s a valuable tip I learned from reading Men’s Health (go figure): To clean a microwave, put a microwave-safe bowl of water in it for 5-10 minutes. When finished, the steam has loosened all the gunk, so you just have to spray-n-wipe. Cool, huh!