The Bug Man Cometh

I've had a couple visits from my local bug man. He tells me that I'm the third house on the block that he is treating for termites...and that is just him. I got a crash course on termite lore...the queen can live for 30 years and she lays an egg every 15 seconds. One nest can infest anyplace within 400 feet. The ones in the nest can't feed themselves and depend on the workers to bring them food.

I'm a little lucky that they didn't do too much damage. It looks like I'll have to replace a 3' by 4' chuck of drywall. There might be some damage behind that but probably not much from what I can see.

They put five feeding and monitoring stations in the house and 24 around the outside of the house. The little bastards are getting a feast of termite chow...except this has a special ingredient that causes them to die when their exoskeleton refuses to molt. YES!!! The workers take the termite chow back to the nest and feed it to all the others including the queen so in a couple months the entire nest is dead. If there is more than one nest the workers carry it back to wherever they come from so this can eliminate all of the nests attacking the house. The bug guys will monitor the stations for two years to be sure they are all gone.

I was amazed at how little they are. I've been looking for something as big or bigger than an ant but these guys are tiny. For something so small they can do a bunch of damage.

I went and alerted my neighbors so they can be looking. The little creeps got into the house through a tiny crack between the footing and the floating slab of the basement/garage floor. My one neighbor's house is built just like mine so I suspect he has the little visitors too.

Watson isn't happy with the bug men coming in the house and he is sure I'm going to get in big trouble for punching a hole in the wall. He keeps looking at the hole and then back at me like "You are really gonna get it...just wait". When the roofers come he will need to go over to Jill's for the day because he won't be able to handle that at all.

The joys of home ownership. Yeah, right.

The American Dream is supposed to include owning your own home. I'm beginning to think that living in a tepee out on the plains was maybe the way we should have gone. I'm sure there were problems with that too.

My roofers have not yet made an appearance. Somebody told me we don't have enough immigrants here in Jefferson City to get the job done. When they show up they won't be speaking English. Oh good. At least the weather has been cooperating, mostly. They say they will be here in about a week.

I'm getting new carpet and vinyl laid in the downstairs rooms but I don't want the carpet guy to show up when the roofers are here so things are starting to back up.

I'm trying to get all the painting and wallpaper stripping done downstairs before the carpet guy comes. This way I can step in the paint bucket and not mess up the new carpet.

The wallpaper stripping has been just awful. I'd try to make a joke here but I'm not finding any of it funny. The flowered wallpaper had to come down but when it did, so did must of the paper facing on the drywall. So I trotted over to my local Lowes store and talked to the "expert" there who told me that I needed to "skim" the wall with joint compound "mud" and then put a coat of primer on it before I tried to paint it. OK -- so I get my "mud" and start putting it on the wall and it reacted to the paper and I got bubbles and ripples in the wall. So -- we go from bad to worse. Next, I sand most of that off -- once it dries -- and try again and the same thing happens. Then I find out that I need to put a special primer on the drywall paper BEFORE I put the skim coat on. Great....so I got that and, after sanding again, I put the first coat of the primer on and the paper starts to bubble up again...but once it dries the bubbles go away and it has a hard shell finish. I put a second coat on today and now I need to wait seven days and it will get rock hard and ready for the "mud".

As long as I had the joint compound out I started to fill in some of the dings and dents in the walls. That went OK until I started to fill in some small holes at the foot of the stairs. That's where I'm always bumping the wall so I'm used to seeing some marks on the wall....but these were different and kept getting bigger as I tried to fill them. OH JOY OF JOYS...I have termites. I thought of going and sticking my head in the oven but it is electric.

I called the pest control guy and he is coming out tomorrow to do my free inspection. I poked around and it looks like they are coming into the house up through the floor between the poured slab concrete floor and the concrete footing for the wall. I've always looked for termites outside the house thinking I would see any evidence along the walls or the footing -- I didn't think to look inside in the garage along the concrete footing and that is how they are getting in. They say that in Missouri, it isn't so much a question of whether your house has termites as when...so it looks like I'll be fighting that now.

On top of this, my property deed showed up in the mail for the house lot out in New Mexico. Maybe a tepee out there is the answer.

Wow -- Things I Didn't Know About August 12

In the picture...I'm the short one.

As I approach my "Big Six-O" birthday I am discovering that I am somewhat uninformed about all the semi-amazing things that happened on August 12th.

I know that I share my birthday with George Hamilton III, Cantinflas and the Olsen twins (Wow) as well as both of my insurance agents.

I didn't know that...

Cecil B. DeMille was born on August 12, 1881.

Both Porter Wagoner (1927) and Buck Owens (1929) were born on August 12th.

Cleopatra committed suicide on August 12, 30 BC

The last Quagga died in Amsterdam in 1883 on August 12th. The (now extinct) Quagga was a horse-like animal that looks like a Zebra from the front and looks like an Ass from the back. (The Quagga and George Bush have something in common.)

Czarovich or Tsarovich (whatever) Alexei Nikolaevich, only son of Czar Nicholas II of Russia, was born August 12, 1904. He was later made a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church.

Speaking of saints....there are at least two saints with feast days on August 12th!

Saint Euplus - who was beheaded in the days of Emperor Diocletian - is one of two patron saints of the city of Catania in Sicily (Pretty good Futbol team). He has to share with St. Agatha.

Saint Herculanus of Brescia -- don't know anything about him except he was a Bishop and he is in the the painting by Perugino of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. He is the one that is reading a book.....So he went to see Mary and Jesus and brought a book? He doesn't seem to be the patron saint of anything. No wonder.