Adventures in Home Ownership

You learn something new each day.  Apparently, there are these terrible creatures called termites and they love to eat wood and it turns out our house is made of wood.  The only thing more disheartening than thinking about how long it will take to pay off our mortgage is the thought that, while we do so, diabolical little micro-terrorists are secretly eating our equity.   They are a threat to our precious freedoms and must be stopped.

K. found some termite traps with a pop-up indicator to show if and where termites might be entering your house.  The kit came with an eight-inch awl and instructions to drill holes for the traps, no more than ten feet apart and two to three feet from the foundation.  No sweat for most of the house, but the deck called for something slightly more adventurous:
Remember The Shawshank Redemption when Tim Robbins ties his escape kit to his ankle and crawls out of prison through the muck?  I thought of that, and a few other films, when I wormed my way under the deck's twelve-odd inches of clearance.  I threw the drill and traps in a tote bag around my ankle, looped the extension cord through the back of my pants, and pretended I was in an action movie circa 1988.
In the spaces between the beams there was just enough space to raise my head and lift the drill upright, so naturally this is where all the spiders made their webs.  K. handed me a stick to sweep away all the creepy wispy stuff, and by the end it looked like cotton candy for naughty children.  Three traps and forty-five minutes later I emerged with bruised ribs, a sore neck, and heroic posture.  Forgive me the smug expression--it's not every day you get to do stuff like this.