171. The Mosquito Conundrum

Mosquitoes are everywhere and when winter goes and just before peak summer comes, they come in hordes into the house and make your life miserable.  When you are watching TV and are immersed in whatever is being shown at that time, suddenly you find an itching sensation in your hands and legs and you immediately try to swat and kill them. While sleeping at night, you begin to hear humming sounds when they come near your ears and disturb your sleep. 

To escape from these discomforts, I have been trying various means to ensure that our house is free of them.  However, each time, they are able to outwit me and return back in much larger numbers😊, 

Initially, it was the BAT that was kept in all the rooms in the house.  I never went for mosquito-repellant ointments as I did not think they were effective.  The Bat was believed (by me😊) to be the ultimate solution for banishing mosquitos.  The sheer pleasure that it gave when you kill a mosquito was simply ethereal😊.  There is also an art of killing the mosquitos.  My family was in the habit of just hitting the mosquito and leaving it like that.  They were not aware that the hit will just stun the mosquito and it will come back to life after a few minutes of lying on the floor.  The art of killing them was to keep the button pressed in the bat, till the time the mosquito is completely killed😊.  This way there would never be a chance for “that” mosquito to come back again!   

But the drawback of the bat was that the charge would go off in an hour or so.  If the mosquito is quite large in number, then the charge might also go off in half an hour.  You have to charge the bat again and then wait till the completion to get it working again.  Till that time, the mosquitos would have an open offer to trouble you again.  One solution is to have 2 bats for each room.  You use one and put the other on charging.  When the one that you are using goes out of charge, use the next one and keep this bat on charging😊.

When I checked on internet to find out what else can be done for this menace, I found out that there are machines that come for catching mosquitos.  I ordered 2 of them to check if it was worthwhile.  The machine was indeed worthwhile, but only while sleeping😊.  I was able to catch a lot them without any effort.  At least, during the night, there was no concert of mosquitos in my ear.  Please find below a photo of the capture😊, over a period of one week.

 

For the machine to work, it was imperative that there was no other light in the room.  The machine has LED lights that attract the mosquitoes and when they come near the lights, the fan below would suck them into the basket in the machine.  If there was any other light, including night lights, curtain not being put in windows or any other light source, the machine would not attract the mosquitos and the machine would not work.

When the lights of the LED goes dim, the machine stops working.  So, I had to look for other options.  I found in Amazon that Mosquito Nets are available😊.  So, I ordered three of them for the 3 bedrooms.   Life again went smoothly during the nights.  The net has zips on both sides so that you can open them and go inside the bed and close the zips again.  Of course, you have to be careful that when you are going inside the net, no mosquito comes inside.  Imagine, switching off the light and then entering the net😊. You are never sure if you have bought someone with you😊.

With the mosquito menace somewhat sorted out in bedrooms, the next step was to find out what to do in drawing rooms.  Recently I found that Good Knight had come up with a Gold version that gives off fumes for half hour, every 4 hours.  I went for it.  Of course, I could not see any fumes coming out, but the machine does its job.  After a 1-2 days of trial, I found it worked best when the fan was switched off.  So, in the drawing room, I keep it in a plug and switch off the fan near the machine.  In the other side of the room, I switch the fan on and sit there.  This way I found that the mosquito menace was very much controlled. 

I tried this machine in the bedroom and found that it was effective there too.  The only drawback was that a fragrant smell comes while the machine is in operation.  Some people may find it nauseating and it may not be a good idea to have it.  But for the rest, it is quite effective.

Hopefully, I have arrived at a good solution to keep away the mosquitos from my life.  But as they say, abhi to picture baaki hai mere dost, I will wait for the next plan of action from the mosquitos😊.

Cheers till next time!

Today’s Observation

Never leave hold of what you have got until you have got hold of something else😊