Moth Pressure

We stayed with my parents over the weekend. This was lovely, apart from the fact that when my Dad snores, it sounds like a grizzly bear drowning in a bucket of porridge.*

But you know, no matter how much you love them, parents have their quirks. And they can be weird.

Now, I don't particularly care if I get insects in my house. If it's easier for me to leave the screen door open when I go through it while balancing a small child in one arm and an enormous bin of recycling in the other, then I just leave it open.

If I find a fly in my house later in the day, I just wave at it with my hand. My parents, if they're visiting, chase it relentlessly with the swat until that creature is dead and disposed of.

Me? Not-so-much.

So this weekend when I was staying at my parents' place, I was highly amused to see my father's dislike of insects in action.

"When you've finished brushing your teeth, just -uh- turn the light off."

I nodded.

"It's just that the light attracts moths."

I wondered why this was a problem, given that all the windows and doors have screens on them.

"See - right now, we've got all this Moth Pressure."

Moth Pressure? I looked to where he was pointing. Sure enough, there were eight to ten moths on the outside of the window and screen. I'm sure that if they could have come in, they would have. But they hadn't. They were just sitting on the outside of the window, minding their own business.

Exerting a certain level of "Moth Pressure."

Sheesh. Gotta love my Dad.



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* I thought that was a quote I'd heard somewhere before. I can't find it anywhere. The closest I found was this great quote that was featured on Blogtations: "Imagine what a chainsaw trapped in a bucket of mucus sounds like. Yea. Got it? Now try sleeping next to that."

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Postscript: I'm in the mood to do Google Image Searches on odd phrases. So here goes: "Moth Pressure." Mister Google didn't disappoint.

Exhibit A, on an Art website: an artist using Corel Painter to develop this piece, called "pressure moth":




And Exhibit B, a recipe on a blog, with a picture of something called "pressure-cooked moth dal":



Thankyou Mister Google.