"Deb, I need your attention for a few minutes"...

In the future, when Alan approaches me out of the blue with a statement like this, I shall pause and take a deep breath, and mentally prepare myself for whatever might come next. In this case, he took me by the hand, removed my glass of water (which is semi-permanently attached) and led me down the hallway to out bedroom. When he got to the closed door, he turned to me and said, "Something unpleasant has happened in the bedroom". OK...deep breath...it can't be that bad, can it? Well, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great either. Termites had gotten into one of our dressers, where a lot of "extra" stuff is stored...extra sheets, extra clothes for Natalie to grow into, extra tylenol, flouride, and other assorted meds, hairbands...you get the picture. Needless to say, in my remotest dreams, this was not the way that I had intended to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Alan was a huge help, removing the affected items to be cleaned/discarded/salvaged, and put them various piles for my perusal. Spraying, sweeping up termite dirt, and unglueing the drawers from the dresser. (One took between 10-15 minutes to free from the dresser.) He then removed them to the back porch, scraped them off, swept them out, and dusted the lot down with "RAMBO" (sounds impressive doesn't it??) insecticide powder. He had the harder, dirtier job. I just had to rinse out the termite dirt from the clothes, sheets, toiletries, etc. and then launder the clothing items. Not everything has made it back to it's proper place yet, but it's on my to do list for the week...

In the pictures you can see where they came up (minus the dirt) behind the dresser unit, and the eating that they have done to the dresser drawers. Most of the "dirt" was knocked off before I thought to take pictures, but I think you get the idea. This was one of those moments when I can honestly say, I NEVER would have to deal with this in Michigan. Thankfully, only one bit of clothing was really destroyed, and the sheets were the "oldest" pair we had...and were only nibbled a bit. What makes living in Niger difficult??? The unexpected.