OMG Yikes

I’ve lived probably half my 48 years in the South, but I’ve never gotten used to the bugs. The first time I ever saw a giant cockroach was in Florida, where they call them “palmetto bugs.” I walked into the hallway in the middle of the night and turned on the light, only to see at least several hundred palmetto bugs scatter in the blink of an eye and vanish. They’d been crawling all over the boxes we had stacked in the washer-dryer area of the mobile home we’d recently moved into. I learned very quickly that keeping these pests out of trailers was friggin’ impossible.

Here in Texas, we have wood roaches. Like palmetto bugs, they’re a good three inches (5 cm or so) long, and perfectly harmless. This does not stop me from freaking out when one is close to me or, worse, is found to be crawling on me. When I lived in my mom’s house next door, I slept in a sofa bed positioned directly under the attic door, and woke up with one of these horrifying monsters on me at least once a month. I duct taped the cracks in the door but it didn’t really help much. So I developed this OCD need to keep my blankets from ever touching the floor and providing them with easy access to my bed. After moving in here to the garage apartment, they’ve only rarely been a problem.

These roaches are not the roaches that occur due to any problem with dirt, food, etc. They live outside and get into the house mostly by accident. It so happens that our front door has a pretty significant gap at the bottom and on the latch edge. I’ve been meaning to deal with it but my less ambitious solutions have been short lived and I haven’t gotten around to making sure it gets done right. Tonight, I’m very sorry for this.

It hasn’t rained here in a good couple of weeks, and evidently (cuz it’s all I can think of) the roaches are seeking water. I’ve killed ten tonight, and nine of those where inside a 20-minute period about 4 hours ago. The shivers such an encounter gives you aren’t to be underestimated, but let me emphasize: ten three-inch roaches. The most recent one flew over here (yep, the males can fly, and they apparently don’t see that well during flight since once one smacked me in the side of the head) and landed on my desk. I have the worst case of the shivers ever. I’ve never killed more than four in one 24-hour period, and that’s very rare in itself. But after the fourth one earlier, I began to wonder wtf, and then had no time to wonder because I was seeing two or three at a time and chasing them down with a shoe and a big container of bug spray. After a while it stopped, and I had actually grown drowsy until the latest specimen landed within inches of my hand, narrowly missing the rest of me (and prompting memories of that one-time THUD! bestowed upon me by its earlier cousin). Now I have to go into the bedroom and pray that none of them found their way back there (which thankfully doesn’t seem to get nearly the level of problems, probably because there’s no sink in there). I do not look forward to shaking off the shivers to go to sleep. I worry that as soon as I let my guard down, I’ll get crawled on. In any case, I’ll probably scare myself a few times with phantom crawly feelings. Ick! Yuck! I hate these bastards.

In other pleasant news, my back has been killing me most of the day. Feels like another kidney stone, oh joy. I’m pretty sure that’s what it is, though the pain is at times radiating all the way across, which has never happened before. But kidney pain is much higher than any other back pain I’ve ever had (excluding shoulder pain). It’s pretty easy to identify.

Wish me luck and spare a thought for rain for the Houston area. Tomorrow we celebrate my daughter’s birthday, and I’d like to sleep with a minimum of six legged interruptions. Good night!

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