Window Worm

A couple of weeks ago, the Young Women in our ward held a fund raiser.  For a certain amount, a group of them would come to your home and complete 2 tasks in a 20 minute time frame.  Knowing that I don't have time to do everything and wanting to help their fundraising efforts, I signed them on to wash my windows.

In the few months we've lived here, we have determined (thanks to neighbors) that our home was unoccupied for about 16 months by the time we finally moved in.  And before that, it was a rental for a while.  Needless to say, my windows certainly needed the bath.  I won't describe in detail the state of the window tracks/sills, but suffice it to say they were living entities of their own--possibly toxic (at least in my mind).  Not wanting to allow the Young Women anywhere near the science experiments growing beneath our windows, I decided to tackle the project before the girls came.

I started upstairs--and really, it wasn't too bad.  I thought it was going to be a lot worse!  And when I headed downstairs, I realized how much worse it was going to get.  When I went to clean the family room windows, I found this curled up in the corner of the window:

I was convinced it somehow wormed its way onto the house from the overgrown plants that used to be right outside the window.  (We removed them over a month ago.)  I immediately texted Ryan and said, "There's a huge WORM THING in the corner of the window!" and then I discreetly asked what he planned to accomplish when he got home that night.  His reply? "Lots on the agenda.  You can do it!"  Right.  I cleaned all of the other window tracks downstairs before returning to this particular family room window.  The creature was clearly dead, but I was well-armed with rubber gloves, an old mechanical pencil (for removal), and a Ziploc bag (to prove to Ryan how GROSS it was--and what I trooper I was for removing it myself).

I psyched myself up and started the removal process.  I wondered if it would just crumble when the pencil touched it.  But, when I actually pushed the pencil between the folds of worm, it was much softer than I thought it would be.  I almost freaked out and quit the whole process.  But ever so slowly, with my eyes closed, I lifted the worm up and out of the corner.

It was about then I saw this worm for what it really was: a brown hairband.  All of that worry for nothing.  I started laughing and texted my husband, "Turns out the worm was a hairband! Still laughing."  I popped it into the Ziploc, (still wearing gloves--you never know where that thing has been!), for proof--along with the pics--that it really DID look like a worm!