Things That Are Bugging Me

[tablesaw]

From an e-mail I just wrote:

My week hasn't been all that great or conducive to reaching the outside world. Work has been insanely busy, which means no time for e-mails at night. And at home, I've been having a lot of trouble with sleeping: either too much ("What? I've been asleep for twelve hours and have to be at work in twenty minutes?") or too little ("Why am I awake after only four hours of sleep? Maybe if I just stay in bed I'll fall back to sleep." Five hours later: "Crap!").

And true to form, I came home and crashed down dead, then I woke up after only six hours of sleep.

---

After spending some time reading, e-mailing, chatting, and generally internetting, I went into the kitchen to start doing some cleaning. As I was moving some stuff around, getting ready to go out to pick up some supplies, I noticed a number of unusual holes in one of our bags of flour. Investigating further, I saw that the holes had been made by some larvae which had eaten their way out and were now lazily wandering around the cupboard looking for some more food.

It turns out that this is not an uncommon occurrence, or a problem that's particularly dangerous or hard to deal with. I believe that we're dealing with larval cabinet beetles, and most of our endangered foodstuffs were already in sealed plastic containers anyway. Still, I'm cleaning and chemicaling the cabinet.

And that, apparently, is why we generally don't buy organic whole-wheat flour.

Comments

[jadelennox]

Lesson I learned after one too many outbreaks of pantry month: put bulk grains in the freezer for three days after purchase to kill the eggs. Seems to have worked so far.

[ertchin.livejournal.com]

Ick ick ew ew.

But I see what you did there with the subject.

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

I throw out a lot of rice, beans, pasta, and flour in bodegas. If you are buying such things in a place with no AC, shake a plastic bag gently from side to side and then turn it upside down to check for bugs. Look through the window in the pasta box after shaking it window down. Moths often eat the glue in the flour bag seal before going in, so check for a loose fold and for tiny webs in the folds. (I could go on and on, but my finger is bandaged making typing slow.)

I keep all such items either in the fridge or in sealed Chinese soup containers at home, so they won't suffer from new or spreading growth.