Friday, July 11, 2008

Bugs...Ewww.

So, I was reading back through my previous blog posts and saw that I mentioned bugs. I also posted the funniest Orkin commercial to the right - but then never addressed it. So here goes...

Once upon a time, there was a very beautiful girl and her very handsome boyfriend who thought that it would be a fabulous idea to buy a fixer upper in a beautiful wooded neighborhood. They greatly admired all of the foliage in the backyard, including the 100 year old oak tree, the Japanese maple, and over abundance of monkey grass (there must have been a special at the landscape store because the previous owners put it EVERYWHERE!). So they move in...and then all of the earthy stuff just became a little too earthy.

Rewind to four years ago, the beautiful girl moved into an apartment during college. It was great...doing whatever her and her roommate wanted, beer and cockroaches in the fridge, eating pizza topped with silverfish...yeah that's right. The apartment was infested with cockroaches. The silverfish was just visiting, but the roaches were there for the long haul. Well, 3 or 12 bug bombs later we realized that our apt. was infested with German cockroaches - the only infesting cockroach in the southeast. Luckily these are not the huge ones, but they are the little ones that can lay on your plates, cool off in the fridge (because they can fit through the sealing), and wait in your bathtub to scare the living bejesus out of you. My roommate and I pretty much retired to eating, sleeping, and hanging out on the back porch. Our apartment was treated for pests weekly (probably not healthy) and we never really got rid of the roaches. We fondly referred to it as Joe's Apartment (the old show on MTV where the roaches were Joe's friends and they talked...disturbing.)

Now, fastforward back to the present. The first instance, of course, was when I had Gretchen come stay with me when Shane was out of town. We get home from dinner and a palmetto bug (not a roach, but they look like one...) is sitting on the door handle to get into my house. Good thing that we hadn't taken the trash out, because there was a little 1x2 peice of lumber in my trash (random?) and we thought that that would be a good extermination tool. So I hit the handle and it just crawls on the windows of the door. Then crawls down to the bottom where the sealing is...oh, good old sealing. About the only thing that sealing does is keep the wind out...because it certainly doesn' t seal the grossness out. Gretchen takes the lumber and tries to kill it, but what we inevitably do is show it the gateway to the interior. So it gets in. We go inside and it is just chillin' by the back door....on my new tile. I don't want to squish it because I just ate and don't really want to hear that crunch - so I go for my safest option...bleach. It won't like it, it will poison it, and it will clean my floor at the same time! So I bleach that little bug out the backdoor.

Next time I see one, Debbie, Katie, and Maria are over to look at the house. The dogs are playing under the couch, Katie is trying to referee them, and another palmetto bug just comes strolling out from under the couch. Then the dogs see him, and that looks fun to them. Katie screams 'Ewww! A cockroach!' Stacy has a flashback to her apartment, and then wonders if she has a minor case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder...and contemplates getting into the fetal position. I totally wussed out and couldn't kill it - I just can't handle the crunch. So Katie mans up, good thing for the brave 11-year-old, and steps on it and cleans it up. Embarassing for me - all the way around.

And then one more occassion, this is when I realized that my palmetto bugs were quite the social butterflies. We have the repair man over to fix our microwave, and what happens? Oh, well that little bug crawls right out of the sink and makes his presence known! Again (this is becoming a pattern) I freak out, freeze, and so the microwave repair man had to kill it and Shane had to clean it up. Absolutely mortifying...they only come out when people are at my house and then I act like it has 5 foot fangs and a fully loaded pistol. Ridiculous.

So...the funniest part was that I was all the while doing research on pest control. I wanted to make sure that I was getting the best service for the best price. After the microwave man left, I just called Orkin. As I'm sweating and breathing like I have just ran a marathon, I agree to whatever price, whatever date, just get out here! I make it sound really dramatic, but it was a good price and I have only seen one more since. He was outside - and I only saw him through the window. But I could tell that he was afraid...and he probably was only there to get the last of his things before he moved out.

So now they are gone...but I won't say that loudly or confidently because these things can smell fear. And I've got enough of that for everyone...

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