Creepy Crawlies

When you've lived on an island for almost five months, you'd think you would have seen everything by now. Cockroaches? Piece of cake. Mice? That's kids play! Poisonous centipedes? OK, you've got me there; I still hate centipedes.

So why would I get grossed out the easiest by plain-ol' maggots?

Yesterday morning I was doing situps when I noticed little worms all over the floor. "Hmm, how interesting," I thought. Then I saw more. And more. And even more.

They were crawling everywhere!! Invasion!!!!

We kind of have a phased attack system when we find bugs in our house. First, we spray them with deadly chemicals. Chemical warfare at its worst. If that doesn't work, we try to sweep them into the dustpan and throw them away. But if they're too fast, we just squish them. You can guess, squishing works the best.

Except when there's 200 of them. I tried spraying the maggots, and it was like they didn't breathe! They were saying, "hah! We thumb our noses at your puny bug spray!" (Maggot noses?) I tried sweeping. They just crawled out.

Their target of choice was the cupboard with the sugar, flour and rice. They climbed and scaled the side of the counter with superb skill, like they were Marines in action. I'd sweep them down, they'd start climbing again. They were maggots on a mission, and I was just a distraction.

So, Jaydn and I resorted to attack phase 3--smash-to-kill. I let Jaydn use the long-range missles. I used the bayonet.

We had to work fast.

Jaydn squished and squished wherever they were, with the fly swatter. I just picked them up in a paper towel, one-by-one, and squished 'em. They kind of "pop" like water balloons. Pretty gross, huh? But if you don't do it, they come right back at you. You can't let the enemy loose; he'll just turn around and stab you in the back!

Apparently, a fly had laid eggs in our garbage. For all you maggot experts out there (and I know you're my most avid readers), you're probably thinking that we don't take our garbage out very much. But then you'd be wrong!

We had just taken the garbage out two days before! But maggots must grow fast in Samoa, I guess. Now we'll just have to take out the garbage every day.

Actually, now that I think of it, they were kind of cute.

Wonder what we'll find next?