Moving and Cancer

Problems and Saviors 

     I haven't posted in a while. I've moved from an apartment to a house, which my husband and I bought. I've started a new job. I've offended some people, because, apparently, the truth hurts. And I've learned quite a few more things. 

     A writer needs social interactions to develop good characters. Being off work for a year and a half and generally only having social interactions with my husband and immediate family made me a little abrasive, I suppose. It's not hard, even in the least, to offend some people. Now, to develop good characters, one needs to know a few characters, even those who get offended by the smallest things. Personally, I don't like some people and would be just fine not knowing a lot of them, but I have to admit, they liven up the diversity in my characters. I guess that's the silver lining.

     When you're looking for a house, you tend to look for things you'd like. When we were looking for a house, we looked at a lot of them that had some major problems. Most of them had a moldy smell in the basement, huge cracks in the walls, really odd layouts, or other rather disturbing signs of huge problems. An important thing for me was a good-sized kitchen - we could have saved a lot of time if the realtor had shown us the kitchens first. Now, I'm not super satisfied with the kitchen we ended up with, but I am satisfied with the house we are now living in. Though it is a bit small, and though the layout isn't the best possible, logical thing on Earth, it fits our needs and is pretty nice. We like it. Now, the radon problem we didn't know we had until after we bought the house is a little of a stinker, especially since it's quite expensive to fix and/or handle. It's not too bad - there are many places which are much worse - but radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer. So, it's not something you can just let go and expect to never come back and bite you. That's something that has a good chance of doing that. 

     Now, the new job. Haha, the new job. Well, I have the best boss in the world, and he makes the going worth it. That's all I'm going to say: my boss is the best, and that makes the world of a difference. 

      To finish, I'm sorry I can't blog as much. I just don't have as much time as I did before. I will try to keep up, but forgive me for being not as involved online as I was at one time.

Happy Housekeeping!

The little bugs that look like woodlice...

The small crustaceans have disappeared!

Image via woodlice.co.uk.

     In my last post, I mentioned that when I returned from a week-long vacation, the gnats in my apartment had been taken care of by a small and friendly spider. He is doing well, going from this corner to that, keeping the apartment free from gnats and getting woodlice trapped in his webs (but they just die there and wait for me to vacuum them up, so they are obviously not part of his diet like the gnats). But back to the woodlice (or what I assume must be woodlice or something closely related to woodlice) who began their subtle invasion during my time away and first appeared to me on the floor in the living room the very night I arrived back home. I saw them crawling in every room but the kitchen, mostly near inside doorways and near (and even IN my bed - not cool, and I'm still paranoid though I've only ever seen one there). I couldn't figure out where they were coming from, why, or how, but my best evolved guess was that they were somehow coming through the a/c and heater vents.

     I've recently replaced my vacuum bag, which was overflowing and stopping up the vacuum's suction, lit the gas fireplace a few times, and officially switched from a/c to heat. Surrounding one of these incidents, the woodlice have dramatically retreated. My guess is the source from which they were coming was either gassed or burned. Yay for the forces greater than our understanding!