Fleas

Now that I've made it to the acceptance phase with my property tax bill, would you like to hear about my plague of fleas?

(As an aside: how inviting is my house, anyway? Don't you want to come to the epicenter of the plague of moths, the plague of spiders, and now the plague of fleas? Come enjoy the abundance of bugs and the dearth of furniture!)

So I left my house and came home with fleas. (That will teach me to go anywhere.) My best guess is that I sat in a flea-infested seat, and came home with several tiny visitors. The location of my first plethora of flea bites supports this theory.

It took a while for the bites to appear, so my unwanted visitors has plenty of time to establish a foothold. By the time I started obsessively washing everything I owned, it was too late. I took to removing socks and shoes and rolling my pants up above my knees whenever I came home; at least that way, I had a fighting chance to see the fleas on my before they could a) bite and b) crawl their way up into my clothes to find better feeding grounds.

I did a fair amount of research, and gathered a fair amount of anecdata, and came to the conclusion that nobody has a clue about the best way to get rid of fleas. There are lots of things that work for some people, some of the time, but nothing seems to work for everybody all of the time.

I took the flea powder approach. This stuff is highly toxic. The label warns that one should avoid having it come in contact, directly or indirectly, with humans or animals. How one is supposed to spread the powder over one's entire house, pushing it down into every millimeter of carpet, without coming into contact with said power, I do not know. I did my best: I wore a mask, I showered and then left the house for 9 hours immediately after I finished. But the stuff was all over me.

I didn't die.

Some of the fleas did. There was a marked downturn in flea-related activity after the initial treatment. (Also, I learned an important lesson: if you have a hybrid vacuum, use it in bagged mode to vacuum up flea powder. Otherwise you will ruin the extremely expensive bagless-mode HEPA filter, and possibly cuss a lot.)

To make the vanquishing stick, I followed up with what seems to be a popular folk remedy: I spread 20 Mule Team Borax all over the place, and let it sit for a couple of days. Actually, for a day and a half: after that, the borax was having bad effects on my breathing, so I vacuumed it up.

And then I vacuumed every day. The whole house. And taped the vacuum bag shut, and wrapped it in plastic, and dumped it in the bin outside.

Once, I skipped a day and the fleas were back.

It has now been 8 days since I've seen a flea or been bitten.

I went 36 hours without vacuuming and didn't see a flea.

Now, I'm going to try 48 hours.

Perhaps, soon, I can go a week between vacuuming sessions, so my neighbors can stop wondering whether I've developed OCD, and go back to worrying about my social life.

Seriously?!?

Yeah, it's been almost a month. Sorry.

The phone thing turned out fine. The phone technician said it looked like someone accidentally pinched a cable while working on something else in the wiring box.

Anyway, I've been distracted by a plague of fleas. But more about that later.

What has me posting today is my property tax bill. My very first property tax bill. Sent, for reasons unknown, to my last address.

As an aside, I can't figure this out. I bought a house. I specified on pages and pages of documents that I was buying the house as my primary residence. So far the company that provides my homeowner's insurance, the lender that got me my mortgage, the city assessor's office, and now the treasurer's office can't quite put together MY PRIMARY RESIDENCE with the place that I live. This has me troubled. (I even had to write a letter explaining why the city had two addresses for me. I did not live in my house until I owned my house, at which time I started living in it. Is this really so unusual?) It took the junk magazines that fill my mailbox roughly 2 weeks to figure out that I had moved and chase me to my new address. If they--people who want me to give them relatively small sums of money--know where I live, why can't the people who want me to give them large sums of money figure out where I live?

At any rate, after taking its circuitous route through USPS forwarding, my property tax bill arrived. Charmingly, the first payment is just a few dollars more than all the money I have saved in the past 5 months. And 3 months after the first payment, I get to pay that much money again.

Now, I knew that I would have to pay property taxes. I even had a rough (though, as it turns out, slightly low) idea of what my property taxes might be. But I never sat down and thought, "Gosh, paying property taxes is like paying 2 extra mortgage payments a year, except without the making a dent in what I owe."

So as I made a giant pizza this evening (and I sure hope it freezes well, because it's going to take me a month to eat this thing), I would occasionally go to the table, pick up the bill and look at it again. The amount doesn't change. Neither does my incredulity.