I have Tinnitus and I love the sound of crickets. Recordings are nice but they don't hit nearly as well. I have a hearing aid which is nice but real crickets are much better. They hit a whole bunch of frequencies that provide me with great relaxation.

Has anyone here raised crickets? I do not intend to eat them. Just hear some real crickets every night when I go to sleep. Perhaps on a small box near my bed.

I live in a house with some space I can use. I"m in Northeast Brazil (Salvador, Bahia).

Too crazy or actually possible?

You tell me!

So after moving, my new bathroom has some issues. Most pressing of all: my shower has ants. It started with a couple, but it feels like it's gotten progressively worse.

I researched this issue and have been spraying my shower with a vinegar/water mixture to kill and hopefully repel them, followed by my mom wiping them up to throw away because the scent of ant corpses will attract more ants. But so far, it hasn't really done anything but kept me from using that shower for a week because of the smell of vinegar.

I sprayed the shower today, when it had possibly the most ants to date, and mom wiped them all up... And then a few hours later I checked and more ants showed up. Actually I just checked again and there are now like, at LEAST fifteen ants in there. At LEAST. So, the vinegar solution obviously isn't repelling them.

We're at the end of our patience. Tomorrow we'll be sitting down to do some heavy-duty research together. The potential next step, based on the site where I got the vinegar solution, is to pour baking soda and vinegar into the drain to try to dislodge all the gunk, because I've washed ants down there and that can attract more ants. So, that might be why they won't freaking stay away.

Relevant vent: why does every single site about killing ants include tons of photos of ants!? I'd closed the site I used and I tried to find it again to link here, but had to stop because the first two sites I checked were full of ant pictures. And I freaking hate bugs and can't stand even looking at photos of them. Or at least, not in this context. I don't want to see MORE ants congregating in strangers' showers, knowing they're in mine already make my skin crawl without having an image of what they might look like at this very moment!!

So, yeah. Researching this has been very difficult for me, but I need those damn things out of my shower so we don't need to share my mom's. So, I'm open to any advice and solutions you all have!

Some other relevant information:

• Here's a photo of my bathroom and the shower. Warning: you might be able to see ants if you zoom in on the close-up of the shower, because they were mostly congregated in that area. Otherwise I would have gotten a better photo of the interior. I saw a lot of advice to touch up caulking, but with the type of shower this is, I'm not sure how relevant caulking really is? The shower is very smooth, almost like the rim of a bathtub.
• There's a skylight above the shower, which was replaced before we moved in. At the very least, it doesn't leak with water when it rains. So help me, if that's somehow the source of the ants........
• Related to above: there's no window I can open, and the room is quite small and narrow. So, humidity builds up FAST and I don't really have an effective way to vent it out or anything.
• I've seen a couple in my sink. Key word: a couple. I think the most I've seen there at one time is two, while the shower can have upwards of... I don't even want to try to guess, honestly.
• I've seen one or two ants crawling up the wall outside the shower, very low down around the moulding. So their nest may be outside the shower?
• At this point the number has me half-convinced there's a nest somewhere in the bathroom. Or maybe there's an entrance on the top of the white shower walls/rim where it meets the drywall?? Except I've only ever seen one ant relatively high up one of those walls, they seem to stick near the floor... Either way, the number feels extreme to me given there shouldn't be any real points of entrance besides the door and skylight.
• Given that articles love attaching revolting photos at multiple points, I'll just ask here if there's any chance they're climbing out of my shower head or the drain. One little fact that prematurely ended my first attempt to research solutions: apparently ants sometime come out of bath faucets. So, yeah.
• At this point, killing ants is secondary to getting them OUT. We've dealt with ant infestations before, we know how to kill them. But that doesn't help when more of them will show up!! I don't want to deal with this problem forever, or even just seasonally!!l

Please help, and thanks for taking time to read this!

Kitchen was in a house of hoarders and has had various roach infestations over the decades. It is something where I cannot mentally use the kitchen with all of the memories of opening a dish drawer/cabinet and having roaches run out, and so part of this deep cleaning (and making this thread) is to quell that mental aspect by literally scrubbing it from top to bottom.

I guess I'm mostly looking for this thread on what product would you use to clean? Obviously the most specific stuff will have their own products (eg the oven) - but it terms of just scrubbing down every inside/outside of every cabinet and shelf and what not, what would you use to say "okay I have peace of mind that this has been cleaned and is safe to use"

But also still looking for general advice, as I've never fully deep cleaned a kitchen. Eg Something I didn't think about but came across was deep cleaning a dishwasher (and I've seen them crawl out of the drain there, so even washing dishes haven't been safe). But I mean macro level it's basically "clean the room and clean the appliances" I imagine lol

...which, and I'm guessing more a plumbing issue than a cleaning one, there is a smell that permeates from drains. It's especially bad in the kitchen sink which does have a garbage disposal (and so I imagine it's mostly take that part and clean it out), but I figured I'd still throw that out there now too for any tips on helping with that

(I've already applied Bifenthrin as an insecticide, and haven't seen anything in the past couple months. I've also completely emptied out the entire kitchen, so I can literally scrub from top to bottom.)

The news has been talking about the burst of mosquito activity, thanks to warm weather and moisture everywhere. In our typically bug-free home, we've lately been swatting a half dozen flying insects a day, mostly flies and fruit flies, and a mosquito here and there.

I'm not necessarily scared of West Nile, Eastern equine encephalitis, or dengue virus, but I'm wondering if anyone has any good tricks for dealing with all these bugs.

How are you dealing with mosquitoes and flies at home?