I will try my best to explain the happenings of the past week and a half without massive confusion. I have many excuses for why I haven't posted recently, and nobody really wants to hear me complain about getting the kids all set for school, and getting my lease car inspected and having furniture delivered... It's pretty self explanatory there. The one thing I wasn't counting on was termites. Yeah, you read correctly. Termites.
Apparently, I was lucky enough to escape the invasion for the five years I lived here before, but termites can infest your house during monsoon season because of the wind and rain. Who knew??? Certainly not me. Last Tuesday, after having my yard sprayed for pests, I went back to bed. An hour and a half later, my oldest daughter woke me, freaking out about a bunch of bugs that looked like flying ants in the hallway between her room and the other kids' rooms. She's prone to overreacting about bugs, so begrudgingly, I got up to investigate "the problem". I will admit, she had every right to be freaking out. There had to be more than a hundred bugs in the small hallway, and another fifty or so in the kids' bathroom. I must also admit, I freaked too. Who wouldn't?!?!?!
As I fought off convulsions, I hastily called my pest control service and screamed at the woman who answered the phone. She quickly said I would have someone back at my house by 1 pm... It was only 10 am. Um, SO not okay. So, I decided the best way to get through the fiasco while waiting for my knight in shiny bug-killer, was to vacuum the little freakish flying ants up. As I vacuumed the hall and moved into my youngest daughter's bedroom, I turned and looked back into the hallway. Not only were there still bugs there, but they MULTIPLIED. Yes, they appeared out of nowhere. They weren't coming out of the vacuum. I could see their bodies in the canister. I'll leave it to the imagination as to the colorful words that were escaping my pie-hole at that moment in time. Where were they coming from? Luck was on my side, because my knight in shiny bug-killer showed up by 10:30 AM. My savior. He, like I, had make the initial assumption that the bugs were indeed flying ants. But upon taking a closer look, he identified them as "Termite Swarmers".
Okay, when somebody uses any word derivative of SWARM, I'm gonna freak the crap out. I'm thinking that at any moment my house is going to cave in on me. We stare at the carpet trying to find the source. I finally realize they are actually popping OUT of the carpet from underneath. This realization then induces my freaked-outedness. He sprays the carpet, but tells me I need to contact the company that actually "protected" my house in the first place.
So, I go crazy searching through my homeowners manual, and guess what? The termite jerks didn't put their number in the book! At this point I'm approaching max velocity. I call the builder's emergency number after getting a recording from the regular number. They tell me that they are only there for "after-hours" emergencies. Needless to say, I went a little bipolar on them and they said they would have the area manager contact me. Lucky for him, he called me back in record time. It's amazing what you can accomplish with a combination of crying and screaming like a banshee hopped up on amphetamines.
So, Mr. I-Know-Everything calls me and tells me this is just a product of the monsoon, and these are indeed NOT the wood eating termites. They are in fact, the BREEDING termites. This information has now put me into full horror movie mode. Had I not been hyperventilating at the time, I may not have heard him tell me that since they didn't have a food source, they would die in the next eight to ten hours. Again I say, lucky for him. Unfortunately, I spent the next seven hours vacuuming up every bug that popped up through my carpet.
Thankfully, what he told me was actual fact, because the creepy crawlies were gone well before I went to bed. I am still having moments of the heebie-jeebies, but I'll survive to see another day; providing my house doesn't collapse on me in the mean time.
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