Sunday, November 26, 2006

Oh, How the Fruit Flies?


Okay, since I told an embarrassing story about me, I'm now going to tell one about D. Fair's fair.
During the summer D and I were in the habit of going to the market and picking up a variety of fresh fruits. We used them in everything, from my patent pending Jeremy's Juicy Rouladin Surprise, to lunches, to evening snacks. The fruit was cheap, and it was good.
There was also way too much of it.
One day, D noticed that we had some fruit flies. She looked at the bowl of fruit, and saw that it was a bit infested. So, she found a place to put it.
Now, I sleep in late, so I woke up some three hours later. I made myself some coffee, played on the computer, and started to consider lunch. I remembered that we had some chili or soup in a tupperware container in the fridge that I could warm up.
I go to the fridge, which is suspiciously empty, except for a big jug of juice from D's sister's wedding and the soup I'm seeking. I grab the soup, and run through emergency procedures for starting the microwave.
I run around the house and shut everything off, leaving only the alarm clocks. The reason for this is that the genious who installed the electricity in the apartment put every single outlet on the same fuse, so if ANYTHING is on when the microwave starts we blow that puny little 15 amp fuse. We've gone through nearly a gross since we moved in.
Anyway, emergency procedures complete, I go to the microwave, and open it.
I stagger backward under the assault of what I estimate to be approximately two hundred billion fruit flies. A veritable cloud of the tiny buggers comes flowing out of the microwave, so dense I have to blow my nose to clear it of the things. I spend the next few minutes finding something, anything to kill them with and eventually resort to a bottle of windex, which gets most of them, except for a randy few that proceed to propogate their miniature race so that we have permanent housemates for the next few months.
I look in the microwave. A few lonely, outcast loser fruitflies hang forlornely over, yes, what is in fact a bowl of now quite inedible fruit.
D's solution to the fruit fly problem was to place both they and their primary food source into a tiny, hot, enclosed space, where, with their infintesimal lifespans they could in the three hours between her leaving and my waking happily spend about a quatrillion generations "being fruitful".
Some other options I quickly came up with:
A: throw out the fruit
B: put the fruit in the fridge
C: hire a lawyer to negotiate the separation of the fruit flies from the fruit (believe me, this makes more sense than the actual solution taken)
I have since placed an injunction on D dealing with anything insect related in the household. If we get invaded by insects from space, I better hear about it before she decides that an appropriate measure in dealing with them would be to hand them over our house keys and invite them to stay over, while feeding us to their young.
I await the next incident with dread.

3 comments:

Mel said...

You killed them! I seem to remember being reprimanded for drowning that bug that flew up my shirt in your toilet....

Anonymous said...

what would have happened if you would have turned the microwave on with them in it? would that be more cruel than windexing them to death...

Jeremy said...

I think the resulting mass of fruit goop and fruit fly goop is too terrifying to imagine.
I'm thinking The Fly but instead of a combination insect/Jeff Goldbloom, it's a winged apricot. *shudders*