eat a live frog for breakfast and your day can only improve from there

[the_siobhan]

So.

I spent the morning cleaning maggots out of my kitchen.

How is your day going so far?

Comments

[siobhan63.livejournal.com]

Better than yours, apparently...

[ihvpave.livejournal.com]

Man, and I was grossed out when I realised we had a group. colony/ murder/ herd/ whatever the fuck they're called of them in our supercan last week.

Got any major open wounds you need cleaning?

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I would say "better than yours", except that maggots are more easily disposed of than my managers and co-workers.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

A sufficient number of maggots might help in getting rid of the bodies, though.

[ihvpave.livejournal.com]

Only once they have begun to rot, sadly.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess it's a choice between a very large Bokashi Bucket and flesh-eating roaches.

I favour the Bokashi Bucket. It makes management and co-workers useful.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

And whatever they've been ingesting is something that you no longer have to clean up and, odds are, it was nastier than the maggots.

[eveofdstruction.livejournal.com]

:( Better than that.

[girfan.livejournal.com]

Maggots are one of my phobias! You are so brave to do that-I couldn't.

[marchenland.livejournal.com]

I had to clean them off my BED the other day. Damn cats.

[eveofdstruction.livejournal.com]

ew ew ew! My cats just pee on things, still disgusting, but less squirmy.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

You win.

This Comment is NOT LUNCH SAFE... read while not eating!

[marchenland.livejournal.com]

The upside is, I learned that you can take the cover off of a brand-new memory foam mattress and wash it, even though the instructions on the mattress say not to. :)

Not that I'm TRYING to win, mind you, but I realized I have a maggot story to end all maggot stories!

(Well, not true. The one with the maggots in the brain was the worst, and I can't top that one. I've never had nor seen maggots in a living brain.)

I grew up in a very old house in South Louisiana, surrounded by fields. Axel's been in it, in fact! The ceiling in the oldest part of the house is made of hand-hewn cypress slats which don't fit together very well, and we don't insulate much down there because in the summer, you WANT the heat to rise and gtfo. The ceiling is so thin, an adult can't walk on it, so I learned as a child to spider along in the attic, from cross-beam to cross-beam.

One year in college, I was home for Xmas. It was the morning of Xmas Eve, and I was headed to Lake Charles, to my BF's house, for Xmas Eve, then we'd come back to my house for Xmas Day. My mom and I had been cleaning the house top to bottom, and she'd turned on the furnace. Normally, we don't heat the whole house in the winter, and just use small gas space heaters in the bathrooms and one in the dining room, but for Xmas, Thanksgiving, etc., we do heat the whole house. It's inefficient and not really THAT warm, which is why we don't use it usually, but it DOES warm the house a bit.

We were having toast, and my mom went into the kitchen for some milk, and said, "Eww, becuase there were a few maggots on the FRESHLY CLEANED counter. We guessed something had been sitting there which had gotten yucky, cleaned them up, and went back to eating, my mom a little green.

I went into the kitchen and... more maggots. My mom and I stared at them for a few minutes and then it hit me... I looked up, at the gaps between the cypress slats and said, "Oh, no." My mom followed my eyes and went VERY GREEN.

So, up into the attic I went, and spidered around the cross-beams, poking my hand into the one layer of pink insulation to find... dead field rats.

Living in the middle of the fields, as we do, you get an invasion of field rats when the crops are harvested. Normally, my parents would use D-Con, which causes the rats to go outside and DIE outside. This year, my dad has used something else, and the rats had simply curled up in the insulation to die, where they were nicely preserved as the weather got colder. They and the maggots were moving VERY slowly toward the way of all flesh.

Until we turned on the heater.

Heat rises, and with it, those maggots rose and shone and gave God the glory glory, and then came tumbling through the slats... right onto my mom's freshly cleaned countertops.

My mom went nuts. My dad went slightly less nuts. *I* dragged the vaccum cleaner into the attic, where I removed the sections of insulation and the entombed rats, and vaccummed up the maggots, while my mother bleached countertops and wrung her hands. I think I hauled out 9 dead rodents, then showered off all the insulation and grossness and headed off to Lake Charles. It was not the BEST Xmas ever!

The worst part was my mother SWORE me to secrecy (oops - I'm not so good at that) and I had to spend all of Christmas Eve and Day worrying about whether I'd found them all, while my mother gave the ceiling haunted looks, and I couldn't tell ANYONE what had gone down!

Strangely enough, maggots don't really bother me. There's nothing on them that can't be washed off with soap, and they themselves are awfully clean little machines, hence their medical use. I don't like flies, but maggots are good things that keep us from being up to our ears in dead flesh all the time.

I just don't want to dine or sleep with them. I'm not THAT gothic. ;)

Re: This Comment is NOT LUNCH SAFE... read while not eating!

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Have you read this (http://the-siobhan.livejournal.com/72775.html)?

Re: This Comment is NOT LUNCH SAFE... read while not eating!

[marchenland.livejournal.com]

I have now.

BTW, I am SO GLAD I had teriyaki with BROWN RICE for lunch while I read that story. *whimpers*

Re: This Comment is NOT LUNCH SAFE... read while not eating!

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I'm not particularly squicked by maggots either, but that was definitely too much for me.

This (http://the-siobhan.livejournal.com/74129.html) is my other story.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

It's been 17 years since we discovered the folly of trying to make the housemate do her dishes by leaving them there.

And I'm still squirming in sympathy.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I had a housemate like that at uni. We put them in his room.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Yeah. But they can crawl.

[inyou.livejournal.com]

I used to put dishes into a 5 gallon bucket and when that was full I would drop it in front of his door...

[tamago23.livejournal.com]

I can link to another Maggot Girl story, if it would make you feel better. She just posted about the time she got it on with a dead maggot-infested deer.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Either you have been reading my e-mail, or you just co-incidentally managed to use the exact same scenario I used to describe why one could never click on /b/

[inyou.livejournal.com]

for all the good that is contained in that /b/oard, there are stories like this as well...

I recently got the old Descent 1/2 games in a dos emulator from a thread there..

[tamago23.livejournal.com]

Except that Maggot Girl is TOTALLY FRICKIN' AWESOME.

(Seriously, I'm trying to coax her into submitting a story to an anthology my company is going to be publishing. She says her original fiction sucks, but I'm doing my best.)

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

How is this not tagged "they're made out of meat"?

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Especially after Greylock's reply to my comment!

[miss-bontemps.livejournal.com]

I didn't know you had overhead baggage storage in your kitchen.

(Seriously though, what the hell?)