But It's a Dry Heat

Archive for the ‘Borderlands’ Category

The Panty Pest

I’ve got him in my sights, corrosive revolver loaded and ready to fire. “The only good Crimson Lance soldier is a dead one,” I mutter. My finger twitches on the XBox controller.

And then my view is obstructed. By a moth. A smallish moth, who nonetheless, chose now as the perfect time to land on the television screen.

“Ugh. Stupid, stupid panty pest,” I say, with impotent rage. Squishing the moth is out of the question, since the little shit will then be smeared over the screen. So I wait until the Lance soldier moves out from under the bug, before unleashing caustic hell. (Side note: Borderland’s baddies, when shot with caustic and incendiary weapons, melt, dying in a theatrical display of screaming and hand waving. It doth amuse.)

“Panty pest” is code for “flour moth” in our household. You know, those nasty moths and their worms, that feed on foodstuff flour, cookies, etc.? At Casa de Kirby, their prime habitat is birdseed, which is stored in the garage. But periodically, there is a huge population explosion, and some get in the house.

The solution is a little paper trap, loaded with pheromones. The moths, thinking they are about to meet the love of their lives, fly into the trap and are stuck on the sticky sides. The end result, moths embedded in tar-like goo, twitching pitifully, is perversely satisfying.

Once, a few years ago, I scribbled “pantry pest traps” on on the dry erase board in the kitchen.

Soon after, we had company and someone, my sister-in-law maybe, noticed, rather gleefully, that what I had written was: “PANTY PEST TRAPS.”

This, of course, set off a lively discussion as to the nature of a panty pest, and whether this was actually a reference to my husband.

To this day, flour moths are synonymous with “panty pests.”

I, Geek

Alternate title, Lazarus, the Xbox.

Horror of horrors, about a month ago our beloved Xbox got a case of the Three Rings of Death.

At Casa de Kirby, this counts as a relationship crisis.  What are a husband and wife to do, if they can’t kill alien hordes together?  Talk to each other?  Perish the thought.

So my super, duper, handyman husband applies some mighty Google-fu to the problem and finds hope. With the proper application of leverage…screws and a soldering iron, it can be fixed.  We can make it better, stronger and more heat resistant.

The fix worked.  For a month.  And then, Three Rings of Death, part deux.  This, just as we had slaughtered the zombie horde in Dr. Ned’s Zombie Island, the add-on to Borderlands, one of the bestest gamer’s games ever.  Or at least the best recent release. (For one, I actually get to play a female character, the ass kicking Lilith the Siren.)

After some agonizing, we decided that we were going to have to give Microsoft some more of our hard earned pesos.  Crap.  So we bought a new Xbox.  Supposedly this version is immune to the three rings of death.

The couple that games together, stays together. Armed with a spiffy new console, we are marching across Pandora in search of General Knoxx’s Secret Armory.