Tenting The House - All Done!

All Done!  We're back.

After three days, we got the call at 9AM, right on time that we could come home.   We anticipated that, so in the rain of that morning, we piled everything we could into the Jeep and Kevin's Beast, and rolled home.  It was only a couple of blocks, so it wasn't a big trial.   Even Rack was happy to leave.

Ed Lugo's Resort was fine, no complaints, but it was truly nice to head back to our own digs.  Home Sweet Home may be a cliche, but it is for a reason.

Pulling into the driveway, we saw our house, darkened.  A light glowed in the living room, all the windows and doors were opened.   Kevin got in first and was chatting with the person from Hugh Turner Pest Control.  True to form we got The Joke.

I was told that I would have to wash everything, dishes, Linens, and the lot.   Then the lady laughed and said that we were fine.

You see, Vikane Gas may be lethal, but it does not leave a residue.  There was a grit on the floors but I attributed that to my own housekeeping shortcuts and had a mental picture of teeny critters falling like snow while the place was buttoned up.  Probably nothing more than a fantasy and the soles of a herd of workers' boots.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into the house though was "It Smells Like Death In Here".

There was a good reason for that.  We found a day later that there was a freshly killed grey mouse on a glue trap that tried to get a last meal in the attic.  It was right next to the air intake for the HVAC system so the scent was everywhere.  It doesn't any more.

Also, coming back into the House Of Death meant that all the no-see-ums were dead too.  That was a good thing because those critters who were eating my walls needed to go.  Dead Termites good, Live Termites Bad.  All the random moths that I would see fluttering around haven't been back yet either.

Unfortunately, my friends the Lizards and Geckos were harmed as a result.  There was one that was alive, probably shut itself off during the time to conserve oxygen, and it survived between the window panes when the house was closed off.  There was another one which was ghostly white and dead on the front of the house.  I'm sure there were more.  I still smell death outside now when I'm in the garden but that's fading fast.

We three settled back into the routine of life.   Rack found his spot between the coffee table and the couch.  We had 14 double bagged sacks of food, medicines, and odds and ends to unpack and load into cabinets.  My own house cleaning hack had to be fixed since we just didn't see the sense of vacuuming before the workers got here, and before they left.   There was a herd of Chihuahuas worth of dog fur creeping out from the nooks and crannies here that got vacuumed up as soon as the pest control worker left.

I am a week past the event when I'm writing this.   The house smells like beer since I'm trying to make Sourdough Starter.  I figure that since the place is open, the "natural yeasts" of South Florida will repopulate fast.  The "clean" house didn't stop my making Yogurt either, the first two brews were perfect.

Yes, normal life here means there's always something brewing or cooking or waiting for the time to bake.

But basically it's all done.  We are back to whatever passes for normal here.  Sometimes you just have to kill off civilizations of bugs to get back to normal.   It took us 6 years to get to this point, lets hope it is longer next time.