The good:

My old comrades the Kissers (irish / rock band) are coming through town this weekend, and I got invited to sit in on pedal steel! I played in several on their weekly side bands for 2 and a half years, till they moved to Botson and left me high and dry (then Busty moved to town, and I went from Whiskey In The Jar to Forever In Bluejeans). This is very, very cool. This place (http://www.high-noon.com/)is NICE, and I get to get on stage. I am a-twitter.

The Bad:

I know where flies come from. At least, I feel like I do. But I cannot explain how my dining room is fuckin FULL of them. It is my understanding that a momma fly finds some garbage or a pile of crap, lays eggs, some gross(er) stuff happens, and then BAM, you get flies. I run a fairly tight ship here, so it's not like there's anywhere they could be coming from that makes any sense. No holes in the screens (and even so, why just houseflies, and why 100 of them?), nothing in the trashcan. I killed, I donno, say 60 of them yesterday, using 3M glass cleaner to slow them down and then a towel to do them in, and then today there's a fresh batch. That bearded dude could film a starving children commercial in there... looks like f'in Somalia.

Biblical plague? What gives? Can they "hatch" out of house plant soil?!? Please help. I miss having a job.

oh man, that is GROSS. i felt the same way when that dude took a shit on my porch the first time, like "what did i do to deserve this?". bugged.

I love your hunting technique.

That's awful. They must be coming in from somewhere. Do you have a basement or an attic with a broken window?

Man, do I feel for you. Right now my house is infested with springtails...they're these very tiny things with some sort of spring mechanism in their tails. You go to smoosh 'em & they disappear. We have a contract with Terminex, and they have no idea how to get rid of them. My wife is ready to move out of the house...

No, no way there just walzing in off the street. I mean, I don't think there ARE this many flies like in a mile radius, outside. They're hatching, somehow, and man-o-man does that give me the willies.

The technique was born of frustration. I have neither a swatter nor any sort of bug spray, but I DO have glass cleaner (the 3M stuff foams slightly, clings better), and that way you get to kill them AND wipe up the mess, all at once.

Chase - where to begin...
A: Someone shit on your porch? That rivals my punching a raccoon on my porch.
B: The first time?!?

richmond's a rough town, baby.

I had flies last summer.

Loads of them appeared in the spare room, not big gross bluebottles or anything like that more like little black fruit flies. There was loads of them, no idea how many, 50+ at least.

I had an all nighter swatting session with a rolled up newspaper and some fly spray. In a way it was almost fun going on a mass murdering spree. It wasn't quite hunting mammoths with spears but I did kinda click into some deep rooted primieval state of mind.

No problems since then. I live 4 floors up so I don't usually have to many problems with insects. The last place was a basement flat....ugh....don't even go there.

Did you by any chance indulge in a black-out inducing drunk 3 or 4 days ago, waking in the morning with no recollection of the previous night's events? If so, suck up some courage and look under the bed and in all the closets. I'm thinking there's a body somewhere.

These are medium-sized, non-buzzy, all-black house flies. The 3M seems to disorient them enough to where they don't see you coming, but it wears off after like 2 minutes.

I have also pondered enlisting the shopvac, but my self-imposed "no more beer before 3pm" rule may be hindering my willingness to break out power tools.

Cap'n, check your pipes to your sink in your kitchen. Sometimes if there's any sort of disintegration/excessive wetness/leaks, flies get in that way.

As for shit on the front doorstep, how about in your bedroom? Happened to my roommate when our house got broken into in Midtown Atlanta. Luckily all the thief did to my room was rifle through my clothes and personal effects, and steal my boombox, Doc Martens and Nikes.

the whole 3m as fly drugging agent is really cracking my shit up. I wish I knew how to help. Maybe buy one of those insect bombs and don't go home for a few days.

Eeeeewwww, damn.... that's clever though. Meanwhile...

Spray, smash, wipe, repeat...

Check the seal around your windows. Last fall, I noticed 3-4, then 8-10 flies buzzing around the kitchen. By nightfall, we ended up spraying and killing about 40 in one sweep.

The next day we found they were managing to crawl their way in through a tiny gap under the kitchen window sill so they could munch on crumbs, water or garbage. Once we got that patched we ain't seen flies since.

We had a similar fly problem last summer in our house. We would swat for hours, but the next day they'd start coming back.

Believe it or not, what really worked for us was good ole' fashion fly tape... you know, the type you see in greasy diner kitchens. You can get 4 rolls for a buck at Wal-mart. Leave it up for a few days, and the flies will be gone.

Gross. Gross... I found a millipede in my bathroom the other night- one my cats was playing with it, and I thought it was a hair band (the light was off), so I started to reach down to pick it up when it started crawling off. Those are some nasty-looking critters. I also have a random ant problem in my bedroom. I say random because there are no crumbs, no cracks for them to be sneaking through, and no trail. I just look down and see 4 or 5 little black ants just wandering in circles. I can't figure out where they're coming from!

Are you sure they are not flour bugs? They fly, small and capsule like when wings are back. We brought those home once from a grocery store. One day no bugs, the next, an infestation. All starch products from pasta, grits, corn starch, cereal, oatmeal, infested and thrown out.

Definitely check the cupboard to be sure. (I am so fucking domestic.)Good luck.

Them fuggas be nasty. Before I knew it one time, all my grits were totally fouled up. Nasty little bastids flying all around the kitchen. Had to go buy plastic containers for any dry starchy-type product. But I think this problem is real flies, and there's a corpse somewhere close by. Or else, I watch too much CSI.

Scenes from my last apartment:

Day 1 - Bad smell in hall. Three newspapers in front of neighbor's door.

Day 2 - Newspapers replaced with yellow police tape.

Day 3 - Flyapalooza!


Someone show this man how to turn off the Repeat on his CD player!

seriously, there is probably a dead rat or something in your wall.

re: fly problem...when you first moved into your house did some voice say "get out"?

I would have moved out, seriously. millipedes creep me the fuck out.

Ok, status report:

Flies have greatly diminished, but are not all gone. 2 theories have emerged... the wife says she saw 2 or 3 fly out of the return grate for the a/c, which is of course a 1.5 by 2 foot grid on the floor, in the same room as most of the offenders. I did not, however, see any down there when I opened it and looked, nor did I see/smell anything past its prime that would account for them. My theory is this - I saw mama cat jump in there, dig out some dirt, and then squat. Yelling ensued, but it makes me think she went and maybe took a dump in that thing at some point. I dug around and came up turdless, and then moved the plant outside.

So, perhaps we shall never know.

Translation: the carcass has been almost entirely consumed by the vagrants.

Either way ...(shrugs)

Oh, crap, I almost forgot - speaking of bodies... The redneck neighbors (nothing so fantastic as OldBulee's, but still pretty good) had like 2 ambulances and 2 cop cars come rushing up last night, and they carried out a lady on a stretcher. The best part: the redneck from the house who was alongside the stretcher = shirtless. I am not rejoicing in their misfortune (I'm 90% sure she was alive), but man, somehow I guess I didn't truly believe they were shirtless inside the house as well as outside. Live and learn! I had the wherewithall to grab my camera, but nothing much exciting went down. I wonder what it was?