found the bug orgy...

I finally found the source of the little flax seed-like bugs that have been crawling all over the laundry room:  the box of dog biscuits.

I haven't been feeling well so I tried to delay the upsetting chore of figuring out where they were coming from, but I saw one crawling on the hallway wall, and I knew it would be just a day or two before they were in the kitchen.  Had to do it today...

I pulled out the most-likely-offending cabinet from the wall, emptied its contents, and then I found the squirming mass of little flax seed creatures eating, mating, and pooping in this box -- drilling holes in the dog cookies for gosh sakes.  I worried that they were coming from the dog food itself because we had seen some of these bugs in the dog food bucket, but no...  this box of cookies wasn't enough for these disgusting bugs so they went looking for more food and took vacations in the dog food bucket.

Every surface in the laundry room has been washed with bleach now.  I smell like bleach.  My hands are cracked from the bleach.

One of the wonderful things about living in Oregon is that it's *really* hard to have cockroaches here.  It's not impossible, but it's pretty hard to get them.

These bugs reminded me of the little baby cockroaches that used to run along a little cockroach freeway near my pillow when I lived in a UC Berkeley co-op.  My room was right above the pantry, and right outside the trash bins.  So sheltered was I (my mother was extremely anal about cleaning household surfaces), that I had no idea what these little bugs were that crawled so near my head while I slept.  I learned later what they were when I became a cook at another Berkeley co-op and saw how brazen cockroaches can be in a kitchen run by busy, young (read: stupid) hippie students.  They were everywhere and had no shame. Once there was a lazy cockroach on the wooden spoon I was about to use to stir a pot...

The bugs in the laundry room have reminded me of the cockroaches that used to roam around my apartment in Brooklyn.  I kept it cleaner than clean to minimize the problem (I learned from my mom how to be completely, crazily obsessed about cleaning up every speck of ick), but the man who lived downstairs in filth shared my front door and bathroom so my efforts couldn't stop the bugs.

I have a young child, a husband, a big dog, a big garden, a house in the middle of many messy projects, two older mothers who need extra attention sometimes, school responsibilities.  I have hormones and fatigue.  Do you think I have time to clean up a bug infestation these days?

I may have to throw away the flax seeds that I have in the fridge.

Comments

[Ines]

Thank you for this post! I just found these little tiny beetle looking bugs in our laundry room and I tried googling without having any idea of what to even call them and I came across this post. (The flaxseed description is what caught my eye). I got out of bed, went straight to the laundry room and took down a box of milk bones down only to see more bugs than I would have liked to see. Eww. Thanks a million.