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The House of Flies

When Daniel and I decided to move from San Francisco to a Colorado mountain home on 4.5 acres, we knew our lifestyle would change quite a bit, if not completely. We had visions of watching the sun go down from our front porch, admiring families of deer helping themselves to an evening snack in our yard, cozying up on the couch to catch up on reading. And maybe it was our bad that this is what we were focused on, instead of basic amenities like heat, hot water, and general protection from the elements, because as we soon found out, that’s exactly what our new home was lacking.
One of the more unique aspects of our house is the fact it runs off heating oil. If you’re getting visions of us silently gliding around in the dark while holding kerosene lamps in front of us, you’re not the only one. But what it actually means is that instead of propane gas or electricity, our heat and water are made hot by a massive underground tank filled with a special oil that pretty much only one person in the state provides. We put getting the tank refilled on our ever-growing to-do list and went back to doing more important things (or so we thought), until one day we noticed the heat wasn’t functioning like it used to, and the hot water was tepid at best. We fast tracked the heating oil delivery and patted ourselves on the back for being pioneering homeowners taking care of things.
Meanwhile, we’d noticed an increase in the number of bugs in the house. In the first few days living there, we figured it was the result of having the door open all the time while we moved stuff in. But we soon realized there was an abnormal number of bugs buzzing at the windows, and the floor was becoming an insect graveyard of sorts. It wasn’t until we had a windy day and heard gusts violently sailing in the windows that we realized it didn’t matter if we kept the windows and door shut, our home was full of holes. We took to vacuuming up the dead and alive in a handheld Dyson while we figured out a solution. Clearly we needed new windows, and while we waited for our appointment, I decided to try a “natural solution” – a mixture of apple cider vinegar and lemongrass that I sprayed around every single window in the house. Instead of being disgusted and deterred as the informational blog post had promised, the bugs seemed energized as they headbutted the glass over and over. I ripped off two nails in the process when my fingers became numb from pushing on the spray bottle mechanism, but I thought, “That’s alright! I needed to trim them anyway.” The excitement of having a new home that was all ours helped us maintain positive attitudes as we learned about our new responsibility.
Have you ever plunged your body into a mountain lake or river and come up screaming because the water is really just icy snowmelt? Whether you have, or have not, that accurately describes what it was like taking a shower the night our heating oil tank was replenished. As this house has so very quickly taught us, it’s never that easy, and we should have known the answer to getting heat and hot water would be a lot more complicated.
Maybe it was the arctic blasts spraying out of the showerheads, the indoor temperatures that warranted wool socks and layered fleece, or the constant barrage of flies and some other creepy looking green bug, but we began to lose our patience. We found ourselves feeling a little frustrated, a little upset, and a lot worn down.
So the next day, while wearing a hoodie and coat inside and vacuuming up no fewer than 15 bug carcasses, I thought, “We bought a house so we could be more self-sufficient. I’m not going to sit around and wait for some plumber to come and rescue us. I’ve got the internet, and I’m not afraid to use it!” (Note: In all honesty, I am afraid to use it too much as we can only get satellite up here and the data caps are unspeakably low.) I quickly researched what to do when you let your heating oil tank get bone dry, and made a list of the tools Daniel and I would need to carry out the job.
When he got home from the office we gathered wrenches, headlamp flashlights, a fire extinguisher, an orange juice container to catch the oil, and whatever was left of our hopes for a warm shower. And then we proceeded to “bleed the line,” or rather leak oil from the boiler’s fuel pump into the orange juice container again and again to get all the air bubbles out. We went through this cycle so many times we had to run out in the freezing dark to empty the bottle into the tank and run back in to do it all over again.
When that boiler finally popped on, Daniel and I scattered like cockroaches in light. We thought the next natural sequence of events would be a face-singing fireball. Luckily, it was nothing of the sort, and the boiler I once cursed and wanted to sledgehammer miraculously started heating up.
We high fived and headed upstairs to crank the heat up and test the hot water. I fixed myself a celebratory cocktail, and took a sip before returning all the tools to the garage. When I got back to my drink, I noticed something in between the ice cubes. There, floating on top of my Bulleit and ginger was a dead fly.

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