Why broken windows are bad.

Today, I would like to talk about another of my great hatreds.

When I first moved in with my husband, who was then my boyfriend, we lived in a house that belonged to one of his coworkers, who also lived there with his cat named Nigel.  Nigel liked to go outside and hunt in the overgrown jungle that surrounded the house, and so, whether by happy accident, or on purpose, I never asked, one of the panes of the French doors at the entrance of the house was busted out which made a makeshift cat door.

But of course, as the case always is, nature doesn't follow the rules of a house and the cat was not the only thing that was able to enter through that door, no, not just the cat.

There was the night that I walked out towards the bathroom and saw a large raccoon happily eating the cat food in the front room, but that is not what this is about.

This is about the flying creatures that trespassed into the house.

Moths have always bothered me (especially since I share their desire to hurt myself with bright lights) but one evening, it was kicked in to full blown phobia realms.  I went into the kitchen and opened the cabinet to get ingredients for dinner.

 I had cut up some chicken and grabbed a box of seasoned rice to make a quick fry up, and so I melted butter in the pan and poured the rice into the pan to brown it before I added the water.

 Only, some of the rice was moving.

And then I looked in the box and found a moth, obviously a mommy moth, and then I screamed, and cried in a  totally hysterical manner, before throwing the rice away and all of the boxes of rice that were in the pantry.  And then I went out to buy the biggest container of mothballs that I could possibly find.

I've gotten to the point where I no longer need to make my house smell like that of a grandma (it only took a few years), but I still am prone to screaming and flapping when a moth finds its way into my environment, and I call (read: screech)  for its immediate removal and/or murder.