So I really love BC. I love that we get flowers coming up in February, while Calgary is still -40. I love being near the ocean and that there are so many forests. I can’t wait until Meredith is just a little older and I can take her out to the beaches on the west coast of the island and show her tide pools and teach her about the rain forests. I love the people, the atmosphere, the smaller city. I could go on and on. But, there are a few things that comes with the warmer weather, forests, etc. that I really wasn’t expecting being from Calgary. (Alice, stop reading here, since I want you to move out here.)
Like earwigs. I’d never seen an earwig before moving out here. I don’t know what it is about them, but I find them nasty. I’m sure they exist in Alberta, but if they did we ignored each other and were both much happier that way. Not so here. I was lying in our hammock the other day, and it started raining earwigs on us. I’m not kidding. I don’t get freaked out by bugs, but I have to say that getting rained on by an already really creepy bug is a little much. Needless to say, we moved the hammock out from under the big tree behind our house that I used to love.
There are other bugs too. I worked at a vet clinic for 4 or 5 years in Calgary, and I saw a flea once. The vets stuck it under the microscope and invited us all to come have a look, since none of us had ever seen one before. Then I moved here. I worked at a pet store my first year here. That pet store has a program where they will house and feed a few cats at a time from the SPCA. It was my job one time to take a couple of new kittens to the vets. Turns out, they were both covered in fleas. The vet said this very nonchalantly. I was shocked. “What does that mean?” “What should we do?” “Do we need to quarantine them?” She looked at me like I had two heads and handed me some flea drops to put on their necks.
Side note: Way to help the animals. Advantage (and all the other big ones that I know of) has a huge poison symbol and the words: “Keep out of reach of children. Harmful if absorbed through the skin.” So we’re dripping a poison that clearly states on the warning label not to allow it to come into contact with skin, on to their skin… Remember what I said in an earlier post about cats being like canaries? Still applies here…
Then we got our pets and experienced fleas for ourselves. The bites I got turned huge, red, and itchy. I refused to use flea collars and drops on the pets though, and discovered diatomaceous earth instead. Now, the fleas don’t bother us. I think feeding the animals a raw diet helps too, but when we do have problems I use diatomaceous earth and that seems to solve it. I’ve never had to use it more than once or twice a summer.
I think the worst part for me right now is the mold. I was shocked when I saw mold on our ceiling. I mentioned it to a native BC’er and his comment was “So? You’ve probably got it on the windows too.” We did. We had someone come in and look at it, and it’s covering our attic too. And while 99% of the time we really love living in a co-op, this is one time that it’s not so good. With a landlord, we could tell them to fix it and they would fix it and quite possibly our rent would decrease while that happens. In a co-op, it’s more likely the rent will have to increase in order to fix it. There are all sorts of hoops that have to be jumped through, and since it’s likely in all the roofs it’s going to be extremely expensive. We’re going to have an air quality test done probably next week to determine how bad the air is. If it’s really bad I’m going to buy an air filter. (Unfortunately, the co-op won’t pay for it.)
I’ve tried to clean the visible stuff numerous times with no luck. People kept advising me to use bleach, but I’ve been a bit hesitant. For one thing, I’m not as worried about the visible stuff as I am about the stuff in the attic anyway. For another, I haven’t even owned bleach in years. I finally bought a bottle of bleach, and the next day someone gave me a recipe to try. It was a bucket of soapy water with lemon juice, and add 20 drops of tea tree oil and 20 drops of lavender. I was skeptical, but tried it out, and it worked fabulously. So now no more visible mold on our windows/ceiling. Though after cleaning the mold off, we realized there are tiny little holes going up through the ceiling where the mold was. I don’t know if they were there before and that’s how the mold got down from the attic, or if the mold caused the holes. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the air quality test shows.
Posted on August 29th, 2008 by AttachedMama
Filed under: Natural Living
I just threw up a little in my mouth aout the earwigs - earwigs? WhAT?
hahaha….any ticks?!?!
Hey now, didn’t I tell you to stop reading? And we haven’t had any experiences with ticks at all yet thankfully, even walking through the forest pretty much daily.
Earwigs are everywhere here but back in the Kootenays I found them only really in the garden. They actually eat other little bug pests so it’s not so bad that they’re there. They did help my decision to wear gloves most of the time though! Ick!
I can’t believe you’ve had to deal with that mould problem for so long now! I hate mould much more than earwigs or fleas or ticks! Where are you at with getting the repairs done? Not to long now and I’ll be doing the semi annual steam clean of the windows. The windows we have now aren’t bad at all but the clean gives me some extra piece of mind.
Ugh, this mold is really bothering me. I talked to our doctor about it and she gave me some things to look out for. She said it’s pretty obvious when/if the mold is causing problems, and since I’m actually allergic to it I would probably show symptoms before Meredith. The two guys that have come to look at it both said that the attic is vented well enough that there are probably relatively few spores in our actual living areas, thankfully.
Basically, I kept bugging the maintenance guy about it, offering to do calls and such myself, but he kept saying stuff had to be approved and he hadn’t heard back and he’d let me know. Then he quit, we got a new maintenance person, and it turns out the old one hadn’t done a thing. So she gave me some calls to do, we had a few people come out to look. The problem is, it’s in all the units and will take most of our capital reserve fund to fix, so we had to wait for some co-op report to come back (which took about 3 months) and now they’re checking out the budget and potentially meeting with the mold guys to discuss strategies.
I pretty much bring it up and talk about how unhealthy it is at every single meeting, and more and more people are getting concerned about it, so stuff is getting done, it’s just slow. We want the air quality tests so we can figure out if it’s something that all the buildings (there are five separate buildings for the 20 units) should have done at the same time, or if we can stagger them to give our reserve fund a bit of a break. Though if they decide to stagger them I’ll be pushing for our unit first, since I’ve been doing all the work. I think I may get a steam cleaner, you’ve told me about that before. That + the tea tree oil concoction I made would probably take care of the visible stuff pretty well once the stuff in the attic is gone. Kris is thinking of going up in the attic with the tea tree oil and a spray bottle and spraying around haha.