About a year ago when we first moved into this apartment, we had an infestation of drugstore beetles, likely coming from the dried Mexican chilies I bought. Well, somehow, the beetles have returned. They came, and when they did, I had the exterminator come and set glue traps for them. That was about a month ago. They were nowhere to be seen for about two weeks after that, and so I thought they had just disappeared. Well, they are back AGAIN, and this time, I have to kill at least 5-6 every day. I find dead, flattened ones on the floor all the time. Even Kaia has managed to kill them by rolling over them and squishing them with her hands, unknowingly on her play mat. Almost every single glue trap the exterminator set up has at least 3-4 dead sesame seed-sized beetles on them. I went through my entire pantry and have no idea what the culprit is. And with these types of pests, they just keep multiplying unless you identify the source.

The exterminator came back today, and he took one of the glue traps with the dead bugs and said he’d examine them under a microscope to properly identify what type of beetle they are. But he’s pretty sure they came in via a bag of grains or rice. I went through all the bags of beans and rice we got in the last month, and I’ve seen no trace of them anywhere. I’m not even sure what to do anymore.

I also found them stuck dead on the honey bottle my nanny brought me back from Jamaica, honey from the hive her nephew keeps. Who knows – maybe these will all just die off in the week we are away in San Francisco if we are lucky. I just hate these bugs so much…

Oh, and my nanny sees them, but she refuses to kill them. “I can’t kill them,” she insisted. “I can’t kill another living being.”

Oh, really? Well, how noble of her! And I can’t hold it against her because nowhere in her nanny contract does it say she has to help me kill household pests!