Three Little Things & Free Little Things

A Saturday combo platter!

I can’t say summer is my favorite season. I’m that bitch who’s all about autumn from my tippity top all the way to my bottom! But, what I do like about summer is being able to grill, if the grill is clean & doesn’t need to undergo a one-hour detailing job before you can roast a weenie on it for three minutes, and…well, that’s about it for me! My favorite part of summer is looking for signs that it’s almost over, TBH. It’s July 8th and I’m ready for everyone to lose their mind about pumpkin spice items coming back to Trader Joe’s already.

My LEAST favorite part of summer is bugs. What the fuck, bugs, why are you like this? Especially this year? And why do you, gnats, fly straight toward my face? Oh, I Googled it. It’s because they are always looking for moisture & salt, like what comes out of your eyeballs! If I have to know it, you have to know it too.

1. This summer, while the air elsewhere has been thick with wildfire smoke, the air in Los Angeles is clogged with the aforementioned gnats. I don’t know where they came from or why, but my son recently visited a very rich friend’s house & he said they too had bad gnats, so “it’s not a class issue.” Which was a little bit of a relief. So, if you are also under a gnat attack, I’d like to recommend this item to you. GROSS PICTURE INCOMING! But worth it, because it has saved our sanity!

This little device is called The SaferHome Plug-In trap. You can find it here. I don’t get a commission for hawking this to you, but I honestly hope you all buy one if you need it because it has made me so much more sane. Because A) it proved that we didn’t just have the same 3 very persistent gnats trying to drink our eye juice, it was dozens, and B) it cut WAY down on the instances of gnats trying to drink our eye juice. Even now when I see a stray gnat buzzing around during the day, I’m able to maintain a cool demeanor knowing that, come dusk, that gnat is going to be irresistibly drawn toward that blue beacon like a douchebag is drawn toward a nightclub so he can bother women who don’t want to talk to him. Only in this case, that gnat is never going to bother a woman or anyone else again! (By the way, there are many similar devices to this one that seem to work in the same way. I don’t think you need to buy this exact one, but I can vouch for this exact one!)

2. Should we stay on the bug theme? Ants are also a huge problem in Los Angeles this year & I’m sure many other places as well. Well, take it from this farm girl, you don’t need to call in an exterminator! Well, maybe you do, I don’t know your ants’ lives, but before you spend all that cash, try this. Get a box of Borax from the laundry aisle. Get a bottle of corn syrup from the corn syrup aisle. At home, mix some corn syrup with some Borax. You don’t need to measure, just make sure the syrup is still liquid-y-ish, not a paste. Then, get a low plastic disposable container out of the recycling - you know the kind you purchased overpriced chicken salad in instead of just making it yourself & you’re ashamed about being bad with money - put your mixture in there & then poke a bunch of holes just above the level where your mixture hits the side of the container, big enough for your local ants to get into. Or, even easier & my preferred method, take a piece of tin foil, blob some mixture on there & that’s it. Then, put whatever receptacle you chose wherever you saw ants. Now, get some patience from the patience aisle & wait. You want the ants to come & eat this delicious treat & bring it home to their colony to share with their buds. Once that happens, your ant problems, in my experience, will be over soon. Might another colony of ants spring up somewhere else in your home anew? It’s possible! But, now you have a simple strategy, plus a whole box of leftover Borax & the rest of the bottle of corn syrup, so you just repeat the above steps. This is the first year since we’ve moved to Los Angeles that we HAVEN’T been invaded by ants & I firmly believe it’s because I’ve developed a reputation in the ant community as a cold blooded killer who keeps Borax on hand at all times. (P.S. If you are worried about using this tip around pets or kids, go with the closed recyclable container. In short, Borax is low risk to animals & children, especially in the amount you’d be using, but it could cause stomach upset if ingested. And, you don’t want your dog, cat or kid ingesting it & getting an upset stomach, you want ants to ingest it so they can rest together in eternal peace.) (P.P.S. If you love ants & don’t think we should kill them, please don’t come for me. I respect you. Send me your address & I will put up little posters very low in my neighborhood letting ants know they are welcome at your place.)

3. Continuing in the insect genre, the third thing, I have not tried yet, but I AM curious about! There was a time, not even that long ago, when Los Angeles simply didn’t have mosquitoes. You could just sit outside with nary a worry about being bitten by anyone except maybe your weird date. But according to the LA times, it’s believed that mosquitoes maybe hopped a ride on some bamboo that was imported to Southern, CA around 2001 and by 2011, they had taken up full time residence in The Golden State, possibly hoping to score some of Charlie Sheen’s famous “tiger blood” which also debuted that year. Anyway, skeeters seem to be here to stay now & they invite themselves to every party or meal on a patio. Pardon the pun, they truly suck. We’ve done what we can to mitigate their impact in our small yard - eliminate standing water, use a fan to blow them away. We have a Thermacell repellent device that works pretty well, if we remember to buy the stuff to put in it. However, no matter how vigilant we are, we always finish the evening with a few itchy welts, which, for me, automatically means I will not be sleeping that night as I scratch myself bloody. So, I’m considering trying this device, the Beurer Insect Bite Healer! Supposedly, a little ceramic plate heats up & when applied to a bite, dissolves or “denatures” the insect saliva or venom that causes you to itch! Again, there are other similar devices to this that seem to work on the same principal, even one that uses power from your phone to heat it up, although my phone battery is usually at 1% & I really can’t ask it for anything more. I’m very intrigued by these devices, but also, you know that I’m a frugal DIY mad professor, so what I am wondering is if a little demitasse spoon dipped in hot water might deliver sufficient heat for long enough to do the same thing? I plan to experiment with this & let me tell you, I kind of hope it doesn’t work because if I find out I could have been putting hot little spoons on my bug bites the past fifty years instead of slowly going insane, I will immediately go insane. If you have used this device, please give us your review in the comments!

That’s it for my latest “Three Little Things” - now onto my “Free Little Things!” IT DOESN’T HAVE TO DO WITH BUGS! My friend Gigi has a great small business called Gigi’s Flair Emporium & immediately following Prince’s death, she was selling many Prince-inspired pins that I loved. So I bought them & would wear them pretty much every day. And people noticed them, of course, because they’re so cute, but at some point, people started giving me a bunch of different pins, which makes sense, because they thought I was a pin girl, when really I was just a Prince girl? And some of these pins I’ve been given are ADORABLE & I love having received them from darling friends! But at this point, I’ve even received doubles of most of the non-Prince pins & my collection has grown a bit out of hand. So, this week as I was looking for a way to manage this pin pile, I thought, why don’t I see if any of our Substack friends want any of these for their own collections & I’ll mail them out?

We’ve got…Cat’s eye glasses, a blue princess dress (Disney? Cinderella?), a kitty wearing glasses, a glass of iced tea with a lemon, “Like a Fox” button, a figural fox that I think is hand made, “Believe Women”, I think this is a woman celebrity with punky spiked hair, but I honestly don’t know who it is & was embarrassed to ask - do you know?, also I think another woman celebrity with long blond hair/bangs who I embarrassingly cannot identify in pin form, a black heart that says “Executive Producer DICK WOLF” which, IYKYK, Pantsuit Nation, Avocado, Triple Corgis, Crystals, “You Smell Nice,” “Fuck 2016” which I think we all still very much agree with, a Magic spell book, and…these actually do have to do with Prince, I had them made to hand out to my friends years ago, but I still have a couple extras, Rude Girl x 2. Again, IYKYK & I can’t be the only one who loves Prince enough to know what these are.

So, here’s the deal. Everything has been worn at least once, but they’re all in good shape. If there’s a pin you’re interested in, drop it in the comments & if more than one person wants the same one, I’ll do a random drawing for that pin. If you’re interested in more than one pin, enter a separate comment for each & I’ll do a separate drawing for every pin if there’s more than one person interested. These pins will be so happy to live on your backpacks, jean jackets & cardis, I think!

Well, now we’ve covered everything from bug murder to li’l fashion accessories. Truly, something for everyone, I hope. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go grill a weenie & hopefully get bit by a mosquito so I can try my hot spoon experiment.