You know me, I don't like to complain

In our apartment there have been interlopers ever since we lived here. They were big, and scary, and completely vile. I’m speaking, of course, of centipedes.

I tried sprays. I tried all manner of remedies to get rid of them. They hang out in the basement and come up through the floors like prehistoric killers sent to murder me in my sleep. They scurry out from under the sofa, they run up the walls—they are evil scary critters, and they give me the creeps.

But I did some reading and I came up with a solution to my creepy centipede problem.

I don’t know exactly where I was reading about this, but apparently people that have problems with insects in their garden use diatomaceous earth to control insects. As I was reading, the more sense it made.

I did some hunting (thanks to Froogle) and found a lot of people selling food-grade diatomaceous earth. The reason I grabbed the food-grade stuff is simple. I didn’t want my cat to decide to eat any and have it hurt her. Apparently if a pet eats some of this stuff it can’t hurt them and in fact would kill any parasites they may have.

Diatomaceous earth feels like powder, but apparently is more like billions and billions of sharp-edged centipede killing particles, which slice and dice the little buggers and they die horrible deaths. It would seem that they lose all of their precious bodily fluids and live out the rest of their miserable lives in horrible pain. Which is fine be me. I hope they get this crap stuck on them and drag it back to their friends.

I filled a pepper shaker with the stuff and shook it along the walls of the apartment, where any obvious holes are from the radiator pipes, behind the toilet and under the sinks, and even took a mug and shook it around the edge of the house.

Since then I’ve seen only two. And I gotta tell ya, they didn’t look too good. One of them haphazardly scurried into range of my shoe, and another didn’t even try to run. It froze. Looking up at me with those pathetic disgusting centipede eyes and practically begged me to put it down. I was all too happy to oblige. Leave no centipede alive, I say. That was back in, what, October? I haven’t seen one since then, and we used to see a couple a week. And each one was scarier and more horrifying than the last, with their hundreds of legs and razor sharp fangs, and the howling—dear God the howling!

So my latest hack for dealing with insect invasions? Diatomaceous Earth. It’s cheap. The only problem is finding a small enough quantity to try. I’m not comfortable making a recommendation, but there are tons of people that sell it. Just make sure it says that it is food-grade. Just in case.