Welcome Home

We arrived back home to find that our pantry had been infested with weevils. Apparently the solitary (or so I thought) moth that I had seen in the house before we left (and that I was either too busy or too compassionate to kill) had been busy breeding while we were away.

So in addition to tackling a mountain of dirty laundry and unpacking I also had the pleasure of dealing with this: every canister, jar, bottle, package, box, packet, pouch, tub or container had little cobwebby cocoons housing the undead worms which had decided that they could live anywhere from their usual haunts of rice, flour and dried goods to the more sophisticated Greek olives, Persian spices and packets of straws. My love all creatures great and small philosophy took a rapid hiatus when I opened a jar of split peas and a large cloud of the creatures flew straight at my head. The gloves were off baby. So I spent the next two days (while feeling perfectly exhausted and pathetically homesick for the States) scrubbing the walls, the floors, the shelves and any jar that would be returning to the pantry and throwing out heaps of food all while I should have been sleeping, preparing for my own lessons or shopping for back to school supplies for the kids and basic food staples of which (speaking strictly in terms of the non-infested kind) we are running appallingly low. Sigh!