It's a totally different story in Georgia where you have pest control on a retainer.
When I stayed in the ground floor condo, I would wake up to palmetto bugs in the house. I would chase them around at 4am with the vacuum cleaner because they were too huge for me to deal with.
The bug vac I had ready in Minneapolis? Useless against the bugs down here.
But the condo was old and not well-sealed. Things would be better when I bought a house down here and moved in.
And things were better. Mostly.
There was just this one little problem in my new home. The scorpions. I can still remember the first time I saw one. It was in my bedroom, it's tail curved up and I'm like, GAH! What do I do? My usual tactic of spraying bugs wasn't going to work because of its shell. I finally stepped on it. EWWWW! But I was wearing my Birkenstock sandals, so I knew my foot would be safe and it's not like I wanted that thing hanging around, and maybe making more scorpions.
So every time pest control came out, I had them spray the attic for scorpions. That's how they were getting in the house. Or at least that's what we suspected.
My second house down here has no scorpions. The bug situation has been blessedly calm. Until last Wednesday. My dad reported to me that there were ants in his bathroom. But he wasn't positive they were ants and wanted me to look at them. No! I don't want to see bugs.
He was going to put down sticky traps and I told him to call pest control. This is what I'm paying them for--quarterly spraying and to show up whenever there's a bug issue.
The pest guy came out last Friday and said they were spider ants. WTF are spider ants? I'm not Googling that! He also sprayed outside and around the doorways and the kitchen although we hadn't seen anything there. Fingers crossed that this takes care of the problem.
If bugs want to live, they need to stay out of the perimeter of death around my house and they for dang sure need to stay out of my home. No bugs allowed.
