Summer.... OF HORRORS

Let's start off by saying if you are eating anything right now, finish it up before you continue reading.

So the weekend before last, I cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom very thoroughly. This has been satisfying. Like Martha Stewart came through and spring-cleaned everything with Q-tips. So clean that Doretta would feel comfortable walking barefoot, or at least with socks, on the floors.

Now it's been hot around here. I don't know if anyone noticed. So hot that on weekends, when I'm away from my air-conditioned work environs, I can't even work up the mental functioning to leave the house. Washing the dishes is an exertion that drenches my face and back with sweat. The towels in the bathroom were hot hanging on the rack. The kitchen counter tiles were hot. The walls were hot. The money in my wallet was hot. So not a lot of cleaning went on this weekend. A lot of taking baths with ice cubes went on, but not a lot of cleaning.

One of the things I cleaned over a week ago was the garbage can. It's one of those flip-top jobs, with a foot pedal that opens the lid. I cleaned the inside, the outside, the hard plastic liner; you could have eaten off this garbage can.

This Monday morning, I'm heading off to work and I go to chuck something out when I notice there's crap all over the inside of the lid. "What the hell," I think, "how did I manage to get rice all over the inside of the lid?"

Do any of you know where this is heading? Can you guess? There were maggots all over the inside of the garbage lid.

I guess it's been so hot, I've been hosting a garbage crock-pot in my kitchen. A primordial soup to nurture fetid new life into being.

I didn't have time to deal with it then, as I had to leave for work. So, despite feeling like I wanted to throw the can into a swimming pool of bleach, I shut the lid and when to work.

I thought about maggots all day. Specifically, how I was going to deal with them. Derek suggested throwing the whole thing out and I briefly considered it. When I got home, I got the gloves on (thank Christ for rubber gloves), surrounded myself with a large stack of paper towels and armed myself with a spray bottle of cleaner.

The maggots resisted being wiped from the metal surface. They rolled around between the paper towel and the metal and wiggled at me and wormed their way into the rolled over metal at the edge of the lid. But my spray and I persisted, soaking their secret crevices with noxious fluid and then sponging them up as they fled their hidey holes ("Like Al-Qaeda," my dad said). Some of the stragglers were so difficult to pick up with the paper towel, that I just started popping them with my rubber-gloved thumb. They made a satisfying explosion under my thumb.

Next time, the maggots should check with the tiny ant community before settling in my house.