Sunday, December 07, 2008
To Be Or Gnat To Be
Two weeks ago I woke up one morning to a gnat infestation in my kitchen. They were buzzing around the kitchen. I checked all around the kitchen for where they might be coming from. The counters were clean and the dishes washed. I had no idea where the gnats were coming from. They had even made it upstairs to the master bathroom. They were so thick I couldn't drink my morning glass of grapefruit juice without a critter diving into share it.
I set out on an eradication program. I hum up some flystrips over the sink. And I put out a Cheerwine bottle with just a little grapefruit juice in the bottom. The gnats would fly into the bottle and drown in the juice. Over a few days most of the gnats fell to their doom, but I never quite figured out where they had come from.
Then just a few days ago we got our first fruit shipment. When I was a kid we had two grapefruit trees in our backyard. Winter mornings I would tip-toe across the frost on the ground to pick a grapefruit from the tree. I became quite addicted to my morning citrus.
So when citrus season starts in December, we order boxes of fruit. The first one came as a mixture of tangerines, oranges, and pink grapefruit. I put some in the refrigerator and then I took the rest down to the coldest place in the house, the closet in the basement underneath the entry stairs. When I opened the door I caught a whiff of rotting fruit and noticed four grapefruit from a month ago I had forgotten about. I gingerly carried the bag to the trash. I finally knew what had caused the gnats to roost. There are still a few lingering around, but now I treat them as uninvited pets. I've even given them names. Here are a few:
Gnat King Cole
Gnatalie Portman
Gnatty Boh
The Gnatural
Gnat Lauer
Gnatcho Cheese
Gnatman: The Dark Gnat
Gnat Masterson
Gnattering Nabobs of Negativity
Gnatsy Boys
Donovan McGnat
BlatantCommentWhoring™: Name some gnats.
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5 comments:
Gnat on your life!
Uh, okay... Cannonball Gnatterley, Gnats All Folks, Gnat A Moment Too Soon, Gnat Turner (he's revolting), Don Gnattingly, Adolf Nitler the head of the Gnatzi Party, Gnatty Arbuckle, Gnatalie Wood, Gnatzoh Bread, Gnatia Comenici, Gnatasha Yar, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Gnat.
Those are all excellent except Gnatasha Yar pegs you as a Star Trek geek. Boris and Gnatasha would have been more mainstream.
I had the same problem with fruit flies when one of my kids left a half-eaten banana in the basement. This is disturbing because it implies that these creatures (or their eggs) already exist in our fruit and if you wait long enough they'll hatch!
I don't think I could possibly top Gnatcho Cheese...
They are flute fries, gnot nats.
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