Making a multi-berry crisp, hey, where’s the cinnamon.
Oh, that’s right…
And as I walked towards the bedroom closet, I suddenly remembered the question I got lobbed at me yesterday that I’d forgotten to answer: surely I’d never had to deal with moths? I never seem to mention them?
One of my children for Valentine’s one year gave me a heart-shaped ornament made from a baked paste of cinnamon and water; I wonder how many Costco bottles it took for the six middle-schoolers (they’re in their third year of college now) to make those for their moms (I wasn’t in on it, the gift was a nifty surprise.) Something to make their kitchens smell nice. And maybe to induce them to make multi-berry crisps by sheer Pavlovianism.
I eventually tucked mine away in a drawer, along with a neglected angora sweater.
No bug has ever touched anything in that drawer, even though angora is moths’ very, very favorite food. Oh! Come to find out cinnamon is one of those things, like lavendar and cedar oil, that repels buggies; one of these days I’ll have to figure out just how to make more of those ornaments. Meantime, I’m taking the lazy way out and leaving a Costco jar of cinnamon with the half-lid left open in the back of my closet. Carefully. Right there next to the cedar chest, with everything woolen in heavy-duty ziploc bags, sometimes bags within bags, cedar, cinnamon, and lavendar notwithstanding. To back that up, I’ve got the tennis-racket mothzappers pictured way back in the beginning days of this blog–$2 at the hardware store, snap’em up if you find one.
My vacuum broke once and I borrowed one for a day from a friend who had wool-to-wool carpeting. Where I parked it, out came… So now my friend knows, after exclaiming to me, THAT’S what carpet beetles look like?
Like innocent little lady bugs that forgot to put on their red dresses for the party?
Yup.
Nope! Oh no, I’ve never had a problem with moths… (Listen, y’all, I had one get in through the screen in the bathroom, that couldn’t find its way around the plasticized curtain, so it chewed a perfect round hole through it. Round=carpet beetles, random chomps=moths.)