The events portrayed in this entry are not to be attempted at home, not even by trained professionals. You have been warned.
So when pressure gets heavy and time becomes precious, especially with an upcoming defense and thesis submission deadline, mundane chores such as washing dishes tend to go undone for a few days at a time. Anyway, this time things got a bit worse than usual, as I found out when I found that my kitchen was now home to a flock of Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit flies, if you will. There's only one animal I despise more than Drosophila and that's the overrated, insanely fast reproducing coprophagous mammal in order Lagomorpha, family Leporidae -- namely rabbits. At least with those darned coprophages, killing them yields useful products such as meat and pelts, which can be used for nifty things like bowstring silencers and ornaments for my quiver, but killing Drosophila yields nothing beyond a split second of glee. But I digress. I also tend to keep a bit of ethanol under the sink for cleaning jobs where plain soap and hot water and good scrubbing doesn't cut it and I don't want to deal with really stinky or toxic stuff. Ethanol is a good cleaning agent and it also makes a good fruit fly killing agent too. So I was spraying the little buggers with a bit of ethanol (by the way, lab grade is best but in a pinch, according to a friend, cheap vodka or everclear does the trick too) and they're dying nicely. Actually if I still had my nice little Drosera capensis (sundew), it would've been a lot more entertaining way of killing the darned flies. But I've sprayed all their possible hideouts and the air so there's some ethanol vapors around. I was also getting hungry and I was about to cook something on the stove, which uses a flame, and I quickly decided against it because I didn't want to risk getting flambeed and ending up with a Darwin Award. So I just fixed myself a peanut butter sandwich and some fruit.
The score now is:
Me -- 1, Drosophila: 0
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