Flies are gross. I know, you know that, and you didn’t have to drop by my website to find out that little nugget of information, but seriously. Flies are gross.

The past few weeks there has been an increase in fly activity in my home. We used to get the odd fly every now and again, but suddenly we’re playing host to ten or fifteen flies at a time. This irritated me and grossed me out a bit, but it was livable until yesterday. My children left the backdoor open yesterday, and as I was in another part of the house, it went undetected for quite some time. Now our house has about two hundred flies swarming it. While I can be occasionally given to hyperbole, I assure you this is a pretty factual count. And it’s gross.

My ceilings are spotted thickly with flies, reminiscent of the time we lived next to a dairy. That infestation made sense, and we learned to shut the door quickly and to aim true with a flyswatter. Now, we are plagued again. We have no flyswatter. So this morning Chris and I spent about a half an hour smacking various parts of the house with two rolled up copies of Creating Keepsakes. Chris managed to accidentally break the little twisty rod off of the kitchen blinds, and I threw up in my mouth a little as I watched the ugly buzzing things become little smears of guts and blood all over my kitchen. Did I mention the grossness?

I called my neighbor Nicki last night to ask if she was having similar issues, and she is, which leads me to believe that somewhere on our block there is a dead body, or perhaps several dead bodies breeding maggots that morph into flies that think they should move into my living room.

I called my mother to ask her advice, and she suggested that I vacuum them up, particularly the ones in hard to swat places like the drapes. This was fun indeed, and it made my husband laugh at me, but it worked, so I’m not complaining. Unlike flyswatting, fly vacuuming leaves no mess and involves a level of stealth and subtlety that is never enjoyed in ordinary flyswatting. For example, I snuck up on one little bugger as he was picking at one of his dead relatives. For a minute I imagined him shouting, “Why Ralphie! He was so young!” Then I realized that it was a lot more likely that his thoughts were along the lines of, “Hmm, takes just like chicken!” And I sucked him up without remorse.

Now, I really need to get back to the kitchen and wipe up the scores of fly carcasses and fly smears, and bleach everything in sight. But before I do, I’ll leave you with this little haiku for the moment:

flies rarely suspect
death while coitally engaged
wield swatter with love