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It would be weird to explain our relationship with rats to an alien. They give us our greatest scientific advances, but if we see them in our kitchen at night, we go after them with a te

Snakes: You kids already know that where we live we have rattlesnakes. You may have been too young to remember when our dog, Molly, was bitten by a rattler. A year or so later, our gardener found a rattlesnake as he was making his appointed rounds with the hedge clippers. Because of those two incidents, your mom decided that not only did we need to get Molly rattlesnake-aversion — trained, but we needed to have the snake wrangler come out and safety proof the place for you two.

First off, I’m not even sure if what the gardener found was an actual rattlesnake. There are nonpoisonous snakes that look like rattlesnakes. They’ve taken on that camouflage, so birds of prey and coyotes won’t go at them. What the snakes didn’t factor in when evolving that camouflage was the fireman who gets called out by Lynette to chop them in half with a flathead shovel.

So, anyway, despite me and my wallet’s protest, the snake-proofing guy came and laid down a powder that smelled like mothballs and tampons put in a Cuisinart (by the way, Mothballs and Tampons is my favorite morning zoo team). He sprinkled this powder in a big circle around the perimeter of the house. This all seemed like a good plan until my assistant, Jay, piped up with, “What if there are snakes that are already under the house? Doesn’t that just keep them in?” Thanks, Jay, for working the wife up all over again. You’re fired.

Flies: Every house has flies. That’s just inevitable. They’re called house flies for a reason. Amazingly, we’re well into the 2000s as I write this, and we still don’t have a great way to kill them. Inevitably, you’ll get that fly buzzing around and go looking for a flyswatter and not be able to find it. It’s a twenty-nine-cent item, but you’ll only buy one and thus spend an hour looking for it. This very thing has happened to me. Just like everything I attempt to locate in my own home, someone had moved the flyswatter to some random drawer seemingly just to fuck with me.

Everyone thinks they’re a ninja with the bar rag or T-shirt when it comes to flies, but you never manage to actually get the fly that way because the whoosh of air you create just pushes it to safety. And the catch-and-release plan never works either. It’s nice to think that maybe that fly was a good person in a past life and you should give it its freedom, but it never pans out. I had a fly in the house once, and after chasing it around for an hour, I cornered it in the bathroom, then sucked in my stomach and slid out the crack in the door to give it a time out. But to the fly the bathroom is Valhalla, like a fat guy getting trapped in a Fogo de Chao. Eventually, I found the flyswatter and sent it to the big shit pile in heaven.

My point is that you’re going to get these things a lot, so don’t go for the fancy Sharper Image flyswatter that kills with electricity. That shit never works. They’re always trying to invent new fly-killing technology. This one uses lasers to shoot them down in midair, this one kills with telepathy; you put on a hat and think bad things about them. Just buy a half-dozen of those classic cheap plastic flyswatters and keep one in every room.

On that note, let me give you a list of other stuff you’ll need to have in your home.

Blue LED Clock: This thing is a life changer. Totally worth the money. It sheds enough light so that you can find your way around at night. It doesn’t need to play an iPod, it just needs to illuminate the room so that when you get up to take a piss you don’t trip over the dog or have to turn the light on and wake up the wife or husband. It’s not so bright it cuts through the eyelids, either. It’s a nightlight for grown-ups, it keeps the room in a cool light and isn’t shaped like Spiderman.