Beef, Brown Recluse Spiders, cotton washclothes, cleaning, diapers?!

In order of the title.

We decided to go with the local smal scale farm, for the beef with the best price: $3.30/lb. It won't be until November, but that gives us time to also use the beef my parents have for us.

It is now August, and we have been in out apartment for eight and a half months. I had gotten used to it's quirks until recently--when a brown spider crawled over a washcloth crumbled behind my diaper stash. I caught it, put it in a jar and inspected it. I could see the fangs on this guy and that concerned me. I texted my slightly-more-arache-savvy neighbor that I had a spider for her to look at and then hit the internet. And there is was: brown recluse.

Sorry Marie

Nothing like getting the heebie jeebies from reading my blog, right? I stuck it in the freezer (cold, lonely death, I know) and told Ben when I got home and then we attempted to make a slight plan of action, which is actually hard to do. We bought glue traps. Our apartment is, for lack of better words, thrown together. There are holes in the walls where the cables for a TV come in. There are outlets that aren't covered. There are 1/8" to 1/4" gaps in the dry wall in the closet that I can see the insulation from. There are holes in the floor in the bathroom that open straight into the hallway below it (which is like an unfinished basement). Half of the windows do not work anymore. I could go on. I won't.

Let's add a couple of players to the game: Naisa and Yonah. My mess makers and crumb eaters. Ben's cousin Josh, who once was bitten by a brown recluse and spent a week in the hospital. What happens when you are bitten by a brown recluse spider: tissue damage--big ugly holes in your flesh. Do not Google it unless you have an iron stomach or you are a nurse.

Can you say conundrum? We also live in a big apartment building with four other apartments. I spoke to our aparmtent manager about ita nd they are willing to call an exterminator , but we now exist with another conundrum. The chemicals. I would love to say that eradication of poisonous spiders is a simple and safe task, but you can really go at it with a can of insecticide and attempt to wipe them out. But our concern, now is no longer the spiders themselves, but the chemicals that are used to kill the spiders. What is that going to do to our bodies years from now? Some companies use non toxic methods, some don't.

And if they don't do each apartment, who isn't to say that they will always be there, in the walls, sneaking out to kick my adrenaline in.

ok. that's all for now.

I've been knitting cotton washclothes like crazy. I thought about selling them. Anyone want to buy a cotton washcloth? $5each. lemme know.

because of the spiders, I have been cleaning the aparmtent more thoroughly, so it's clean every night and even when I am tired, I still try to persevere to finish. I finally got rid of some big piles that were in our bedroom and took care of some tasks that were needing to be done.

My bloth diapers have been giving me some frustration lately. They were ammonia smelling, so I took the time to strip them, but they still smell ammonia-y after using bleach and dawn soap. I am just going to have to break down and scrub every last one of the inserts with the dawn soap.

That's all.