Okay, so as if I don't already have enough to deal with right now, this morning I was back in my son's old room, now my craft room (though that's going to change, more about that another time) - I happened to glance out onto the small atrium/porch. It's full of flies. I mean full of flies, like the Amityville Horror kind of infestation. Sonofabitch.


It's hard to describe the layout, but picture a small rectangle - one side of the rectangle is screened. One side is the sliding glass door into my daughter's old room. One is the sliding glass door into my son's old room. One is a wall with a window on it, opening into my bedroom. Above is a contiguous roof with a skylight. The atrium is not accessible from the outside. It has a wooden deck floor, which I have always wanted to replace with a concrete slab. Well that's no longer a wish list item, it's gonna happen. That wooden floor is coming out NOW.


Because, when I walked around that side of the house to find out what the hell was going on, I saw that some enterprising animal had removed the bottom board from the small deck, and scuff marks in the newly laid mulch are clear evidence that somebody has been traveling in and out under that deck. Possum or raccoon, that's the only question - the drag marks of a round belly are obvious. If the board fell off on its own, I'd say possum - I can't see one of them being ambitious enough to actually remove a board, they'll dig but they're not much for working with their hands. But I'll put nothing past a raccoon - I love 'em dearly, I think they're hilarious and cute, but they are adorable pains in the butt. One friend has all but padlocked his garbage cans at his house, because they have managed to figure out how to open every latch he has tried. Anyway, somebody has moved in under that deck, dragged in dinner, left the remains to rot, flies were born, and now my back porch looks like the freakin' Amityville Horror as the flies swarmed up through the deck boards. So I grabbed some spray and killed as many as I could through the screen - I don't DARE open the sliding doors into the house to attack them, I'd be freakin' swarmed in minutes. So, just when I have no time or energy or spare cash to deal with it, I am going to have to hire a good critter wrangler, who will probably have to rip out that wood floor to get my freeloading tenants out.


And no, I don't live in the country. I live in a suburb of Orlando, in a neighborhood of "established homes" - by Florida standards, where everything was built five minutes ago, that means the neighborhood is over 20 years old. Lots of landscaping, a couple of lakes. Small animals in droves - bunnies and possums and raccoons, citrus rats and the owls that hunt them, osprey fishing in the lakes, turtles, ducks, great blue herons, they all live here with us. It's amazing how we displace nature with subdivisions, and in time nature moves right back in - and in this case, gets even. Very cool, too.


BTW, the softhearted can rest assured, I will call a critter removal service, not a critter killer, to get whatever this is out. They can take him/her/them to the state park a few miles away and wave bye-bye. I'm too softhearted to kill them, unless it's rabid or poisonous, it gets to live. Just not under my porch, if it won't take out its trash.