Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The bad wife chronicles, episode 168

There is a little battle going on in our house about what to do about the fruit flies that have TAKEN OVER EVERYTHING.

Which I can't really tell you about without a little BACKGROUND about how Jeff does the dishes, because it's HIS JOB though I'm not really sure he would agree with me on this. But anyway, he does the dishes. Except he refuses to wipe the counters or clean out the sink after he's done because something about becoming like his mother who was too clean or something, blah blah save it for the therapist did I just write that out loud? So I NORMALLY codependently follow behind him--while announcing that it is really his job--and clean the counters and sink and then I get to hate it and feel virtuous and superior. Except now I'm pregnant and I go to bed early and such and I really just can' t be bothered most of the time. So our sink is a little grody. Is that a word? Wasn't it? I think the kids like five years younger than me in high school said that for awhile.

So naturally, being a SCIENTIST, I see a huge cloud of fruit flies poofing (a CLOUD! POOFING, I tell you) out of our gross kitchen sink every morning when I wake up and every day when I get home. Thusly I develop a HYPOTHESIS that PERCHANCE the fruit flies are enjoying our warm moist food-caked kitchen sink enough to get some serious breeding done. That it may actually, what with the dropping outside temperatures, be an IDEAL environment for such reproductive fly shenanigans.

Meanwhile, five feet away across our kitchen, I am--get ready for this--housing a FRUIT BOWL. Seriously, I do this, I bring home fruit and we eat it. And I don't refrigerate all of it because I am from Pennsylvania and that's not what we do there. And this is somehow in conflict to what they do in California where apparently they ALL refrigerate ALL fruit ALL the time. Except not at his mother's house because I've been there and I've seen her fruit bowl and it is at room temperature.

And you know, OBVIOUSLY fruit flies like actual fruit. OK. But given the PAUCITY of flies crawling on the ACTUAL FRUIT, I suggest, gently (GENTLY! because that's really the only way I know how to be, in relationships, all gentle and sweet all the time), that maybe, just maybe, the fruit flies are breeding in the sink, what with the POOFY CLOUD OF FLIES and all. And that maybe, MAYBE, a cleaner sink might help to, I don't know, kill them off.

And he's all, I can outscience you, lady, and remember I went to MIT where I worked on that fly-eye simulator and therefore I understand the mating habits of fruit flies and I'm here to tell you that the flies are only feeding on the actual fruit that you insist on BUYING like a BARBARIAN and putting in the FRUIT BOWL.

And I'm all, but that fly eye thing wasn't ALIVE. It was a computer. And look at the poof. At the sink.

And he's all, the BANANAS, lady.

And I'm all, can't there be TWO causes of the problem? Like maybe it's BOTH the bananas and the rotting food in the warm, wet sink?

And he's all, no.

And I'm all, but the poof.

And that's pretty much where we are with the VERBAL part of the battle. Except he put the bananas in the fridge and I cleaned the stupid sink and now he's in there cleaning it out again. And I'm remembering that one time I took a genetics class and we did fruit fly-related lab exercises and there was this stuff called FLYNAP, seriously that's what it was called, and we put it in with the flies and they would take a nap and then we'd take out the flies and look at their red vs white eyes or kill all the virgins or whatever and then close up the thingy and the FLYNAP would wear off and the flies would wake up. And how now I'd like some FLYNAP except not the kind where they wake back up.

And I'm also remembering Florence, a coworker who refused to eat any food brought in by a cat owner, no exceptions, because YOU NEVER KNOW if the cat had climbed on the counter before the owner made that food and brought it to the office and it just CREEPED HER OUT. And now I know none of you will ever eat at my house, and that's too bad because we really are very nice--cute, even!--and I even bake.

12 comments:

J said...

Love.

- J



my woman's stove was hardly cleaned
when we met she lived alone
she'd cook her food and leave the grease
and eat her dinner on the phone

the backsplash would accumulate
each hard and yellow splash of grease
which added to the dingy look
since the day she signed her lease

my mom would always come to nag
if any dirt was on my jeans
i never did get over it
but at least I learned to clean

now in her stove i saw an asset
though some would look and run
i can be the clean one now
she'll like that kind of man

i cooked her a spaghetti dinner
fresh oregano and thyme
and later wiped the stove down
it had a new found shine

she savored the experience
of having a man that showed
the fun of wiping after cooking
revealing a clean stove

we married in september
and i often cooked her dinner
and I thought this would excuse me
from the nagging like my mother
but when I did not clean the stove
she thought I might not love her

Lisa Wheeler Milton said...

You ARE nice and cute and when you add the baking bit? Well, bad wife just doesn't apply.

I would gladly eat alongside your flies.

(We've had tons this year too.)

Tania said...

I'm down with Florence after watching my friend's cats walk across the cutlery and plates that were set out for my dinner. Also, I'm down with your poof theory.

Anonymous said...

We had flies last month. I think you're probably both right. :) We finally got rid of them using RAID. Which I didn't want to do for fear of poisoning my children but NOTHING ELSE worked. And my kids are still alive and have their appropriate number of limbs so I think it's okay.

smalltownme said...

I am with you on this as we've had fruit flies in our bathroom sink.

Madge said...

i don't buy fruit. i just figured out it is to cut down on the fruit fly population.

totally working so far.

Jen's Farmily said...

hee hee. Unfortunately, it's my job to do the dishes.

unmitigated me said...

This has been a primo year for the fruit flies, and they were in our drain, too. I put a whole bottle of bleach in the sink of hot water, then let it drain while the disposal was running. Yay!

Anonymous said...

Ha. I live in Africa. Takes more than a few fruit flies to scare ME off.

We've got 'em too. Also millions of moths and mosquitoes and, dare I say it, teeny weeny little cockroaches in the kitchen. Also chemical killer. Come on over! I make tortillas from scratch and also very good banana bread. ;)

Unknown said...

As a former fruit fly researcher, I can tell you that fruit flies don't eat fruit, they eat yeast that's growing on fruit. And yeast that's growing anywhere else. Not to tell you how to run your bidness, but are you setting traps?

A good pointless argument once in a while is fun. Sometime I'll tell you about the fight Matt and I had about ketchup smells. That's right. The odor of ketchup.

Hay said...

erm, so what I REALLY want to know is...how do you tell if a fly is a virgin?

lol woman, you are so funny.

Stacy (Mama-Om) said...

You are funny.

Fruit flies in October? You guys got it bad. :)

We had 'em so bad one summer they were all over our bathroom. WTF? I went crazy trying to figure out what they might have been eating in our bathroom and where the hell they were coming from. Crazy.