Dealing with clothes m*ths (I am SURE this is not the species I have though - the adults look nothing like the line drawing. I will say I kind of like the "fumigate with dry ice" idea...I could get behind that. Seal the yarn up in a big plastic box, on some kind of a rack, and put the dry ice under the rack and let the CO2 do the work. Or, it looks like if I can get it to over 120* in my car, I'm good - okay, now I hope we do get more HOT weather.

However, as I said, the adults don't look (or behave) like the ones I've killed, and I've seen no webbing evidence.

NMU's advice. So it looks like ant-killers may help. Except I can't spray clove-oil right on my wool. And I'm one of those people who's sensitive to PDB, so that's out.

CSU's advice. Okay, their picture of a webbing m*th COULD be the same insect that I killed...brrr. I guess I need to (sometime? When? I have my night class tonight and tomorrow I'm going to be in the field) buy some plastic sealable bins, sort the stash, and, I guess, deal with PDB...that is, if the Wal-mart in town even carries it. Sigh. (I bet they don't. They never have the things I desperately need.)

I realize in light of Katrina striking the Gulf coast these concerns seem trivial and silly. But I can control this, I can't control the fact that New Orleans might go away...

Later, a couple of calmer thoughts:

1. Several of the sites alluded to the fact that in warm climates, there are four "hatchings" a year. So this won't be a constant thing (like the ants in my bathroom where even if I could kill all the workers, every 2 weeks there'd be a new crop). If I can kill the m*ths now, maybe I can nip it in the bud.

2. I can totally do the garbage-bag-in-the-car thing. Just gotta get some black plastic trash bags. (I use the white ones for kitchen trash; I don't think they'd get hot enough.

3. A crazy thought - I could fill the bags up and hoist them onto my back former-porch-room roof and leave them THERE. It gets danged hot up on the roof, and I'd not have to worry about potential marauding dogs or gangs of petty-thief-trained children (and don't laugh, and don't condemn me for saying that: there are a couple families in the area that train their kids to do just that - lift anything that's not tied down out of yards to sell at their ongoing "yard sales")

4. Must check my nice British lambswool cardigan that I got for Christmas. Of everything, that's what I'm worried about most - the sweaters and shawls I knit, if they have holes or weak spots, I can invisibly repair them since I have leftover yarn from all of them (thank God for being a hoarder, at least in this case). Still might do the "empty the contents of a can of Hot Shot into the closet and shut the door tight" thing. Better yet, might devise a way to quickly seal off the closet, and then spray and seal. Hmmm. I never bought the Visqueen and duct tape that was recommended back when they thought all the terrorists were gonna come and get us with smallpox (and when they thought that you could seriously survive such an attack holed up in a closet sealed off with Visqueen and tape), but maybe this is the time to do something like that....

I'm hoping that the "four hatches a year" thing is correct, because that means their generation time is a bit slower than I feared - which buys me a little time to sort and plan and bake yarn in my car. Instead of going into panic-mode and saying "Oh my gosh, there's a black speck on this ball of yarn! Out it goes! No time to check to see if it's really caterpillar droppings or if it might be something else! Maim! Kill! Pillage!"