One of the things in life that many people don’t understand, or want to cope with, is cleaning up. I remember in my earlier acne years discovering socks from bygone years all cuddled up with one of those numerous monster dust balls under my bed, begging to be thrown out with all the leftover refuse caused by laziness. Even after all these years of growing into a multi-decade human, cleaning up just doesn’t grab me as an appealing time waster.
Then, scientists invented the molecular microscope and a whole new world was revealed living on a speck of dust floating through the air. Yes, the mite – an extraordinarily minuscule creature, which looks like a tiny crab – is something we never knew existed in our daily lives, even on our bodies. It is, in a way, something straight out of a Dr. Seuss children’s book. In fact, one speck of dust has about 100,000 of these little critters all happily living away and munching on anything small enough to fit in their tiny mouths.
After watching and reading up on these mites, I discovered that the entire world is covered with them. They act like tiny goats let loose in a flowerbed, they’ll eat anything and everything, but their favourite food is dead skin and they constantly poop a by-product, yes, their feces. In your average pillow, about 10 billion mites are quietly filling your pillow with mite crap, which makes your pillow lumpy. Now that you know, you’ll never sleep without changing your pillow at least once a year. I’m sorry, I had to tell the masses.
In fact, mite poop cause allergies. Often mistaken for allergies to dust and other items, in reality, it’s poop, poop and more poop. Thankfully, the mites are actually helpful. Can you imagine all the dead skin lying around in layers in your house? Most humans shed their skin at least twice a year in total (just guessing) so you can imagine our little mites do contribute in a way.
Which brings to mind, that dust mites are just one of the thousands of types of mites. One kind of mite lives in your eyelashes and looks like a corkscrew. I’m not sure what they live on but I’m sure mascara is not on their menu. In today’s world of overexposure to so many variations of the flu and other types of diseases, caused by overnight international flights and transmitted by unknowing human hosts, keeping clean is no longer something that is associated with looking good, it can be a matter of life and death. So I do dishes on a regular basis just to keep my hands clean enough to fight off any disease. But hey, those mites just keep coming back to haunt me under the bed and in the closet.
To battle those deadly dust mites, I bought a robot, which thankfully and faithfully vacuums every little square inch of my floor (available at hardware stores). On my next trip south, I will get the robot janitor, which will wash and polish my floor while I’m out at work. I don’t think I’ll get a dishwashing machine though. But hey, you never know, they might actually make one that works.
