Lord of the Flies

We have an infestation. A fly infestation. Somehow (when I say "somehow," I mean, "because I left the door open all day and there are holes in our screen"), a bunch of flies got into our house yesterday. I noticed them around lunch time, just sitting on our screen door. I didn't do anything about it. I figured I'd wait and see how it all played out.

Later on I shut the door and they were inside. Flying around. I thought they were flying rather slowly. I think they may have a disease or are disabled. Scott thought they were normal. We'll disagree about this till the day we die.

Anyway, Scott and I have very different approaches to how we deal with bugs in our house. If the bug is harmless and uncreepy, I'm fairly passive. If they're not bothering me too much, I figure we can all live in harmony. If they're creepy, then I run away and have Scott take care of it.

Scott, on the other hand, makes it his life's work to kill every single bug he sees--harmless or not. I think it's really just a game to him. When I was a kid, we had a Super Nintendo. The only game my mother would buy me was this Mario Paint game that wasn't even actually a game, just a bunch of "activities" of an artistic nature. It came with this mouse and the closest thing it had to a game was this fly swatter exercise to help you get used to the mouse. I imagine that this is what it's like for Scott killing flies. Ironically, we do not own a fly swatter.

Back to my story. Scott came home and we went about our business, ate dinner, watched LOST obsessively on Netflix. All the while, Scott was planning his attack.

Finally, while I was putting the baby down for bed, he had his chance. Free reign over the house. Total destruction for the flies. After a few minutes of rocking the baby, I hear a whack. Then another one. Soon they become more frequent and more intense. I knew what was going on out there. Those poor flies. They'd been living in our house in peace all day, assuming they were in the clear. After all, if they were going to be killed, it would have happened right away.

When I came out of the baby's room, Scott presented me with his killings. 8 dead flies. It was like when your cat is all proud to bring you a dead mouse. I congratulated him and he told me there were still a couple more, but this was the best he could do with the piece of junk mail he was using to kill them.

We went to bed in peace, knowing we wouldn't be attacked by a band of disabled flies. But now what's Scott going to do with his free time? I may just have to leave the door open again today.