As someone who lives in a mosquito-ridden area, I’d usually spray the target room with mosquito repellant. However, this method is toxic so I’d usually stay outside the sprayed room for a while.
If you want to avoid toxic fumes I’d say blue light traps are pretty effective, though they won’t kill as many mosquitos as the repellant.
The propaganda from King of the Hill has made for sub-prime cookouts for all my life up until a few months ago.
Believing propane was the superior heating element of the cookout, because of Hank Hill, I never tried a charcoal grill. But when I went to other folks cookouts, it tasted so good. A little sweet and smokiness charred into the meat, “How did they do that?!” I contemplated late into many nights.
I switched to Charcoal after a friendly suggestion, and the difference is mind-blowing. If you’re cooking with propane, you might as well be cooking on a stove.
To be fair, there was an episode of KotH where Bobby and Peggy discover that charcoal was actually superior to propane when it came to taste. It was a whole big thing and hilarious to watch them try to keep it a secret from Hank lol
There are traps which are called mosquito magnets and they hook up to a propane tank to burn a small pilot light which produces CO2 to attract mosquitos and pull them into a bag via a fan.
You want to place them at the edge of your property though not close to your deck because they attract mosquitos in order to kill them.
I have tried these. They are expensive to run as you need to burn through a tank of propane each month. They do catch some mosquitoes, but they make little overall difference.
Okay then go with the electric ones. I had the propane trap and while it worked well the constant propane tank refill was a drag and I certainly couldn’t afford multiple.
Enter Dynatrap + Mods.
Dynatrap uses an electric light and fan. It works medium but if you put the octenol attractant in the catch basket it really turbocharged it. Want to kill more? Hang a “bug ball” under the trap covered with Tanglefoot spray. Any mosquito that lands on the ball dies there because they are stuck. The ball will be thoroughly disgusting looking quickly but very effective.
I’ve spent many years combating.
The Bt mosquito dunks help for any standing water ( have gutters?)
If you get creative you can put maybe a candle floating in the middle of a large bowl of water, then a bit of detergent will break the surface tension to make them fall in. The detergent will also kill them.
Twice: after waking up,before bed. Floss, tongue cleaner , mouth wash is a part of the ritual. On a related note : can recommend electronic tooth brush.
The amount of individuals here who brush post breakfast or not at all in the morning is alarming ! Of course, mental health can affect the schedule but that’s a different conversation and is understandable.
The rest, how is your dentist not harassing about your oral hygiene?
Important caveat: just because electric toothbrushes are good does not mean “more power = better”. For natural teeth, you should always brush gently. Don’t go ham just because you’ve got a powertool in your hand!
If your brush has multiple intensity modes, always use the lowest. Same thing goes for your grip! The whole point of an electric is that it can get you clean with almost zero pressure. Seriously: apply no more pressure than necessary to get full bristle contact. It will extend the natural life of your teeth and gums by years.
Call an exterminator, preferably a small mom&pop shop and not a big Orkin or Terminex or whatever, and have them come and and do a mosquito treatment. They’ll spray a chemical on the outside of your house, under the leaves of your trees/bushes, etc. Then they’ll spray inside, but just the corners for other bugs. You’ll need to keep your dog out of the chemical inside for about 10-20 minutes, and out of the chemical outside for probably an hour. After that it’s dry and non-toxic to mammals but will get soaked up by insects. Be sure to double check that with the exterminator, times vary depending on the chemical used.
Good treatments should last a solid 2-3 months, which ought to be enough to get you through the worst of mosquito season, unless you’re in Florida or something.
I’ve heard that those treatments are fairly indiscriminate and will kill most insects, not just mosquitoes. I worry about the effect on the local ecosystem such as birds that would eat them.
Get a couple of buckets of water and place them around your yard. Drop a “Misquote Dunks” tablet in each bucket. Follow the package instructions for refreshing the dunks every so often.
Mosquito dunks work by “poisoning” what looks to the mosquito like an ideal spot to lay eggs; a pale of still water. But the mosquito dunk bacteria kills the mosquito larvae before they hatch.
It’s a more “long term” solution as it doesn’t actively take care of the current mosquito population but it prevents them from breeding.
There is also a type of fish called the misquitofish that you can put in a small pond, such as a wash basin or feeding trough. They feed on the mosquito larvae and are fairly self sufficient. I know people who use them to control mosquito populations in their gardens and they rarely have to do any kind of maintenance.
The Muv-Luv trilogy, or rather Muv-Luv Alternative in particular. I just went into hermit mode for the full 60 or so hours it took me to read/play all of it.
It still has its flaws of course but the worldbuilding and character interactions with such a dark and conpelling but not edgy story are something that nothing else has matched for me.
Once a day before going to bed, including interdental brushes.
My teeth are doing well, and probably relevant:
a) Keto, so next to no sugar/carbs in my diet
b) acidic drinks (coffee, tea, once a week quite some cola zero with some alcohol, half a bottle of wine once or twice a week), which makes brushing attack my teeth (I have light acid damage already)
Essentially a brush for flossing, some find them easier to use than normal flossing, but there are also people like me who have super tight teeth and the floss can’t go through the top.
I am allied with spiders against mosquitoes and bedbugs. I don’t take down their webs (unless they’re in the way) and they eat hundreds of the fuckers. They’re also fun to watch sometimes.
I wish we could talk to spiders. I’d write an agreement with one that says, as long as it doesn’t crawl on me, it can live in the house. I’ll even build it a little shelf to protect from fan wind.
I would also include a clause that says I never have to see it ever. It can basically be a roommate that lives in the basement and has their own entrance in the garage.
We can’t write those agreements, but evolution could do it for us. I know that we kill an insignificant amount of them compared to how many are in the wild, but maybe certain spiders in urban areas could be under enough evolutionary strain to actually get better at staying out of our way.
Not sure if this is good or bad news for our great (10^6) grandchildren. On the one hand, maybe they’ll see less spiders. On the other hand, urban-camo spiders sounds horrifying.
I woke up the other night gagging in my sleep. I swallowed spastically, compulsively over and over - something was in there. I coughed and wheezed and choked for what felt like hours before it was gone. But a lump lingered until I finally fell asleep again. I chose to believe it was a common house fly, but it went down large and hard.
The moral is, its not about seeing the spiders, its about having stupid, instinct-only vermin that will crawl into any dark, moist space it finds. Their instinct doesn’t even allow for a concept of what a human is. They only know how to eat and screw and maybe be afraid.
spiders usually avoid humans anyways, so that’s good enough for me. also they don’t fly at high speeds or make buzzing sounds, which turns them into top tier animals, that don’t have spines, in my book
I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve had spiders crawl on me even while living with them, and yeah it still makes me squirm. They usually mind their own business.
I would like to invasive species your huntsman we moved here and they have roaches in all the garages in the neighborhood (the place used to be an orchard, and before that like all of the americas an indian burial ground)
We had a “pet” spider that lived in the kitchen. There was this spot the ants kept getting in, and he (? I assume) moved there and just started eating the ants. I hate ants. And so a pact was formed. Then one year my mom hired a cleaning lady and she didn’t bother to ask about Gerald.
I have been doing this to myself for over a year, and nowadays I think tarantulas are cute, and I’m looking forward to learning to tolerate harvestmen.
I have so many spiders on my property. My fave is the bold jumper that lives in my living room. He started off by moving in and residing in a box of captain crunch. I let him live there and he left eventually and moved to the living room. Idk what he ate when he lived the cereal box, but he got significantly bigger.
While I don’t agree with either extremes, I’m much more comfortable with hard left than hard right. Hard left isn’t actively established and trying to foment genocide in real time.
Yea after wasting a lot of money on repelents and creams , I realised just closing doors after 5 pm and netting the windows was the best solution. I also use net tent for my bed.
agree on the nets for doors and windows. For doors there’s also some nets with magnets that can be crossed though and they will self-close perfectly every single time thanks to the magnets.
Badminton is great too, including against flies, wasps and whatever manages to get in.
it depends in my experience. Mine has lasted for years, but I had to stretch the net a bit to avoid contact with the middle one after a bad hit. In my experience, if one don’t think one’s at Wimbledon, they should last.
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