I'll just entertain myself

I may give that a try.

A few years ago, I got a fly trap - the kind with some kind of liquid in a glass container. I won't say it didn't work, but after a couple of days, the whole house smelled like a very dirty cat litter pan. Do not use these inside the house.

I put the Irish Spring in strategic places such as where they enter the house and at the window they gravitate to. I don't smell the soap after a bit, but more sensitive noses may disagree.

we use those kinds of fly trps in the barns. They are called"BIG STINKIES". If you caN GET EM with the gif blown glass receptacles, they are qg antique collectors items. (I assume the collectors wont pay anymore if they contain dead flies.

i buy mine at farm auctions

If my memory isn't too vague, you told me a bit about them these many years past. I do know I mentioned the problem at the time.

antique prices change a lot. sorta like mesquite. ya cant give it away anymore

You want mesquite, you better know somebody with good connections.

The light rain ahead of the storm couldn't deter me from picking street trash. Considering I had to skip it last week it was not so bad. I found another twenty in the same spot I found the first. What it clearly says is they hope to get me in trouble with these counterfeits. I picked it up like the rest of the trash. I could have left it to let them know I'm wise, but somebody else might have gotten in trouble with it.

Why do they dislike you? Or why do you think they dislike you?

It goes back over twenty years. We came home one day and saw a kid run from behind the house and go into the house directly across the street. The back door was damaged from him trying to pry it open. We called the police. A cop went to that house and took him away. I had told the cop "He's just a kid. Maybe we should let him go." The cop said, "That's not how you handle these things." He couldn't do more than take him off and lecture him. But he went back the next day and walked the kid around, lecturing him and threatening him. His mishandling of it made the kid bent on revenge.

For at least twenty years he and his friends were vandals and every time a cop came in the neighborhood I got the blame. They loosened the lugs on my truck, to name one of the more malicious acts. They waited until we were in bed and pounded on the door with some metallic object a dozen times.

In all this time I remained passive. Never said a word to or about them. Then the police raided a neighbor's house. They spent three or four days investigating and hauling away stolen goods. The kid - grown up by now - had poisoned the people's minds against me by spreading his lies over that twenty year span. I was blamed for siccing the cops on the neighbor. Since then the vandalism and bad will has escalated.

I could write many paragraphs about how they try to bully me and how they vandalize the property. The thing about the vandalism, they don't steal anything or do the kind of damage that costs much to repair. But it's a daily thing. Was daily, until a couple of months ago. Some of the ringleaders must have moved to a different neighborhood or something. Except for the few who spread trash, much of it suddenly abated.

Good Lord. That sounds like a dodgy neighbourhood.

And, with the right frame of mind, someone picking up their trash is indirectly calling them slobs.

There is a sub-class of humans who think being an asshole makes them some kind of hero.

I am aware. Sub-class is a term I hadn't thought of

The 20 I found today was in the identical location as the 20 I found a few weeks back. But the store clerk said keep this one. It's real. I'm glad I showed it to him.

Can you speculate? Seems odd that a second would be in the same place and only one would be counterfeit. Maybe that clerk doesn't know as much as he thinks he does.

The clerk's boss was there and he also called it genuine. I have a new theory. Over the years people have stopped in the middle of the road and handed me the occasional 20 to show gratitude. But at 9 AM, most of them are working and don't see me. The giver of the 20s may not have known the first bill was a fake. Good intentions, then.

That's a nicer way to look at it.

True. But the first one was justified when it was counterfeit. The bad ones have done some pretty bad stuff. Like putting about twenty pounds of rotten meat behind the mailboxes, putting a dead dog in a box in the same spot. One parked at the end of the run and waited for me to come all the way down, then drove his car at me enough I dodged him. He was not trying to hit, just intimidate. Broke beer bottles all over the mail platform. Stuff like that.

There's a tragedy I hadn't mentioned before. Shortly after I killed the big roach with Dawn water, I saw what I took to be a very young roach at the rim of the sink and quickly sprayed it. As it made a ball and died, I realized it was Tinkerbell, the spider living beneath the shelf over the sink. Oh, well. When I accidentally wiped away her predecessor, Trixie, Tinkerbell was quick to step in. I am certain there are more in there somewhere.

I once had a spider in my shower. Not a pet, but we got along. One day, a daddy longlegs killed her. I have been short on patience with that type of creature ever since.