Chutzpah

Mosquitoes are such a problem in my backyard that they nearly render my deck useless.  You can’t have dinner out there without being assaulted by the creatures, and if the girls go out to play we have to spray so much repellent on them I worry about giving them permanent DNA damage with all that chemical.  The problem is that the deck sits on slanting land three feet above one side right up to the deck on the other, and the far side has no access (it’s flush up against a stone rock wall).  Thus, fall leaves, season after season, accumulate and form fertile breeding grounds for the beasties.

On advice from a colleague at work I went to Home Depot yesterday and picked up one of those Ortho Bug-B-Gon bottles you attach to your hose.  I went outside, hooked everything up, and emptied half the bottle dousing bug city beneath the deck, along with their suburbs – the four giant bushes that straddle the perimeter of my house, each also with a blanket of decaying foliage impervious to fall raking.  Per directions on the bottle, I have to spray the rest of it seven days later for best results.

Now, I was outside in the entirety of this project for ten minutes.  TEN MINUTES!  And in the course of those TEN MINUTES, I got bitten by mosquitoes no less than THREE TIMES!

Arghhhh!