More Moth Battles

1. I'm back in my apartment and back to my life. Vacation is always fun, but being home and in your routine is great, too.

2. We currently have a moth trapped in the stairwell of our apartment building. I first saw it on Sunday while on my way to the grocery store. It was flying around by the door to exit the building.

It is by far the biggest one I've seen here, and therefore the biggest one I've seen in my life. I know I said that the other ones were big, because they were. But I couldn't imagine that moths could be this big, so I thought the ones before were REALLY big.

Obviously, when I saw it, I screamed and ran back up the stairs and made Alexandre go back down with me. Obviously. We live on the fourth floor of the building, and there are no elevators. Of course, when we went back down, it wasn't there.

There are little windows next to the door to exit the building. Alexandre insisted that it must have flown out one of the little windows and therefore couldn't have been that big.

Then, today, I was making lunch when I heard feet pounding up the stairwell, and then Alexandre came rushing into the apartment. "That moth! It's there! Oh my god, it's so big!" He exclaimed, out of breath.

"See?!!?!  I told you!" I felt so vindicated, but at the same time, panicked. It DIDN'T go out the window after all!

The evil moth has decided to hang out on the door of apartment 12 all day. I eventually had to leave the apartment to go to work, so again, I made Alexandre come down with me. I brought my umbrella down with me in case the moth was STILL there on the door, which it was. So I used the umbrella as a kind of shield and ran down the stairs (totally worked). After my classes at the school, we went out to dinner, and Alexandre picked me up, so I didn't have to go back into the building until we got home from the restaurant.

I made Alexandre go up the stairs, and I followed slowly behind, again with my trusty umbrella shield. STILL THERE.

So then when we got back into the apartment, I gave Alexandre my camera and asked him to go down and take a picture for you guys. Look what dedication he has to the blog!

So now you can see how I am only slightly overreacting (scroll quickly, Danette):

 

Look how big! It's so big that the camera picked up its eyes and it has red eye from the flash. If you click on the picture, it'll get bigger and you can see (also you'll notice that it has blue swirly patterns in its wings).  It's bigger than my hand. Think about that. Stretch out your hand and imagine a moth bigger than that.

So what I really wanted was the size perspective with the door, but Alexandre imagined that you all wanted to see a zoomed-in picture of it, and beggars certainly can't be choosers, especially in silly cases like this. So I went ahead and took a picture of our door so you'll kind of get an idea (I drew a blue line for you):

Do you see?!?! Can you imagine?!!?

I really don't know where this fear of flying insects came from. I mean, I was always kind of creeped out by bugs in general, but it didn't like, control my life the way it does now. I guess it's because I didn't encounter that many flying bugs, especially these freak mutated things that make their way into my once-safe human space. I don't know how logical this is from a psychological perspective, but my many brushes with death run-ins with these monster bugs have actually increased my fear to possible phobia status instead of decreasing it due to some kind of flooding effect, which one would expect.

Turns out it's an actual phobia: Mottephobia! Fear of moths! See? If there's a Latin-root name for it, that means I'm not just making it up. Also Danette (twin sister) is totally freaked out by moths, but we never had any kind of trauma from them. So it must be genetic.

I don't work out of the house tomorrow until 6:00pm. (I was gonna go to the gym, but now I'm not so sure.) I hope someone else has taken care of it by then. If not, well, it'll just be me and my trusty umbrella shield, braving the wilderness!

like Kirby.