Buggin’
[about two weeks ago]
Eating lemon sorbet at my desk, straight from the pint with a serving spoon like the classy dame I am, I drop a nickel-sized blob of sorbet next to the keyboard. My desk is actually not a desk, it’s unfinished lumber laid on top of two bookcases, so I can’t really wipe up spills; I blot them and try to forget them. Usually.
[about ten days ago]
…But not always.
My fridge gets a little overeager at times and just straight-up freezes everything — better that than the alternative, I suppose, but it’s a bit difficult to see the bright side when you’ve just sprained your wrist trying to cut an onion-sicle. After dressing a salad with some vinaigrette cubes and eating in front of the TV, I settled back at my desk with a (frozen, unbeknownst to me) can of Diet Coke, which promptly [chonk!] convexed on the bottom of the can, [spenk!] convexed on the top of the can, [fffffsssss!] announced its displeasure with this room-temp state of affairs, and then [fsshhplap!] Bellagio-fountained the left side of my desk with ice chips and denatured aspartame. Three hectares of paper towel later, I settled back at my desk again, with a glass of lime seltzer this time, because of course that was the last Diet Coke in the refrigerator. Explody little bitch.
[Sunday before last]
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw what looked like an orange cat doing the hokey-pokey. I closed my eyes for a moment, reminding myself that while I do have an orange cat, he does not dance, and perhaps I should think about getting more sleep, but when I re-opened my eyes, sure enough: you put the left paw in, you draw the left paw back, you put the left paw in, then you pat the floor nine times, you do the Hobey-pokey and you pounce on bits of lint, what is that all a-bout.
Well, he’d found a very very tiny ant, is what, and the two of them were locked in a pat-pat-pat-pat-pat/play dead/run off/pat-pat-pat-pat-pat paw de deux, which went on for another twenty minutes, at which time I couldn’t take it anymore and blew the ant under the TV.
This may have been a mistake.
[six days ago]
“Oh, hello, ant.”
[five days ago]
“Beat it, ant. [flick] Beat it, other ant. [flick] You too, other ant…s. [flick flick]”
[three days ago]
I got to my desk and found two ants standing on the site of the sorbet blob, shooting the shit. I mushed them both; minutes later, another ant crossed the keyboard and over my hand to get to the blob. After snacking on the blob for a few seconds, it strolled over to a former Diet Coke puddle. “I have ants,” I said, to no one. “Faaaaaan-tastic. Not.” The ant zipped behind a brass bookend and out of sight.
I cleared off the desk and Lysoled the hell out of it. When I could kind of breathe again, I Febrezed it for good measure. I put everything back on the desk. The next ant is apparently hoping for a career in show business, because with perfect comic timing it waited exactly three beats after I’d sat back down, then made its entrance from behind a Bill Bryson book.
An hour and a half was then wasted trying to arrange a Post-It that says “FUCK OFF, ANTS” on it next to the sorbet blob, then waiting for an ant to walk in front of it so I could take a picture.
[two days ago]
I cleared everything off the bookshelves. It was a dusty, shoulder-muscle-twanging pain in the ass, but I knew this would not end until I flushed out the queen and flattened her with a vintage dictionary, so into the breach I went with Swiffer sheets, soapy water, and the righteous rage of a woman who has excused her horrendous housekeeping failures for years on the grounds that at least she never had insects.
On the plus side, I forgot I even owned that biographical dictionary of film. On the minus side, many sneezes and no queen. It is true that I did not see any ants on the desk afterwards, but I did see one on top of a picture frame on the living room table, carrying a tiny set of surveyor’s equipment and wearing a tiny tinted visor. I leaned down to the ant: “You tell Big Mama that when I find her, she’s toast.” The ant was like “whatever man” and then I was embarrassed because I tried to threaten an ant, and it didn’t even work.
[also two days ago]
It was nighttime; I had plans later, but right then I was chilling on the couch paying bills and watching Rocky IV on Spike. The cats, typically, remained quiet and unobtrusive throughout the relatively dull “Apollo, I must warn you for the purposes of dramatic irony that this fight with Drago is a bad fucking call” lead-up. Nor did the scuffling start during the interminable James Brown performance (but how awesome is Apollo’s short-sleeved sequined Star-Spangled Banner tailcoat? In fact, how awesome is Apollo Creed? Can someone please start a band and name it “Apollo Creed’s Restless Ghost”? That guy is a honey-baked ham. What ever happened to Carl Weathers, anyway?). No, they waited until the climactic moment of the exhibition match when the Cold War is punching Apollo in the head, to death, to come barreling out of the bedroom all scrambly pouncy, and Hobey’s tail was so fat, he looked like a beaver, but it’s not like that’s anything new.
The cats chasing a beetle the size of a baseball? Yeah, that’s new.
I have never seen a creature like that in my life. It looked like a toy, or a beetle crafted by the effects department for a movie about…I don’t even know. Baseball beetles from outer space. And where did the cats chase it? Straight at my legs. That thing was fast, too. I think. It sounded fast. The sound of its hooves on my wood floor sounded pretty fast to me.
So, it ran under the couch. Terrific. I assume it’s still under there, snacking on a mastodon leg or whatever it is prehistoric carnivorous beetles who owe me fuckin’ rent do in their spare time. I promptly packed up my bindle and went over to Skyrockets’s house, and the cats followed me to the door all “you’re going to leave us alone with that thing?” and I was like, “Nice knowing you, bye,” and ran away.
The SIZE of a BASE! BALLLLLLL! Gee-ROSS!
I will not sit here and tell you I don’t eat on the couch, drop crumbs on the floor between the table and the couch, and leave the crumbs there for a couple of days until I get motivated to sweep. I will not sit here and tell you that I pull all those board games and books and photo albums and dead labor leaders out from under the couch every time I mop the living room, either, because I don’t, because it’s a pain in the ass. And I will not sit here and tell you that I’m going to start now, because the Beetletron 3000 is under there, and if I scare him out, he’s going to Drago me.
But I have to. Otherwise the next chapter in the saga is going to involve coming home from work and finding rats trying on my shoes.
Why now?
Tags: city living feline fun times home 'n' garden
Dear Sars,
I had ants for a brief time this spring, and found out from internet searches that ants really dislike mint and citrus. I used lemon verbena scented wet dust wipes (Mrs. Myer’s Clean Day, I think) on the floor once or twice a day for a few days and never saw another ant. Good luck.
Dude, I don’t know why you have all of a sudden gotten an infestation, but I feel you. You might just have to break down and get some Raid or something. We managed to get rid of the ants that were attacking the cat food but they were replaced with SLUGS.
I’ll give you your gross beetle, but nothing – and I mean NOTHING – is more disgusting and heebie-jeebie-inducing than walking into the kitchen to see a slug feasting on the Meow Mix. I think the cat was more horrified than I was, and I’m feeling the ick over it to this day.
…Ew. And yet, that’s kind of awesome. Like, what kind of a bonehead is that slug? Its friends are looking at the slime trail up the side of the bowl and saying to each other, “Dude KNOWS we eat leaves. Come on.”
(I don’t know what slugs actually eat. They just seem like leaf-eaters.)
Terro is the thing for the ants. And hopefully that “beetle” isn’t a giant roach. I’ve still never quite recovered from the time in high school when I put my foot into my fuzzy slipper while I was still half awake and one of those fuckers was waiting inside.
Try vinegar. I had ants in the kitchen and asked my grandfather (who, in the tradition of wise old black men, knows everything) what to do. He recommended plain ol’ white vinegar. I poured a few capfuls down by the baseboards in the kitchen and by the window (I have the window open with a screen now that it’s hot). I mop the floor every week and make sure to do a vinegar touch-up and I haven’t seen an ant since. Dunno if it works on beetles and I hope to God I never have to find out.
Sars;
Pray to a God, any god, the god of ant repellants, but pray to one that they don’t find your bedroom, because that? Is not fun. It is the direct opposite of fun. Waking up every thirty minutes because you could’ve sworn you felt one on your face, only to look in the corner of the room you last saw them, only you you can’t see them, because in my case I’m certifiably blind as a bat with glasses or contacts, but you could swear you heard them plotting, only to have your significant other twitch next to you, because an actual ant did actually crawl up his actual pant leg at some point? Heinous. Bungalow in the mountains? Never Again!
That little bungalow/house also had a slug problem. The big bright banana slugs would somehow wind up on the screen door and then not move and die there. Like WTF?
Ants also hate cinnamon. Sprinkling ground cinnamon around wherever they seem to be does work, although it looks like really dirty dust & might cause sneezing.
I read that if you wipe down all your counters (or desk) with diluted white vinegar it removes the ants’ sent trail so they get lost and die. Or you could go for the big guns and use Ortho Home Defense bug spray. It kills on contact, and if you spray it near the doors and windows nothing new will come in.
Terro Ant Killer is (a) fantastic and (b) worth buying just for the blurb on the packaging, which claims that it kills a variety of hilariously named ants including “ghost ants” and “crazy ants.”
http://www.terro.com/index.php
As for the beetle, eeesh. All I can say is thank you for making cockroaches (which I cannot seem to get away from–“thanks,” 85-year-old house in the deep South) seem modestly sized and comfortably familiar.
In the name of scientific accuracy, I must point out that I think aspartame PRECIPITATES rather than DENATURES. Denaturing is what proteins do, and while nutrasweet does have phenylalanine in it, I don’t think it can actually be denatured. Also, that’s usually a heat thing.
Also, I am a giant know-it-all nerd ass. Sorry.
“paw de deux”–brilliant. That is all. Well, actually, also, ew. Please tell me you’re exaggerating about the baseball thing.
I have to say, though it was rather heebie-jeebie-ish, my slug infestation also fascinated me. There would be one that would just appear, on a cabinet, once a month or so. Or oozing its way across the kitchen tile. It was like the initiation to the slug gang was to infiltrate our apartment and just puzzle us. Of course, I never killed them (talk about Darwinism- they survive because they’re so much grosser smushed), so maybe it was the same slug every time, making it back to his secret entrance, convinced our kitchen was utopia and we were the evil guards.
Sars, please wear protective gear when you delve under the couch, I don’t want to see the follow up to this story, “When I lost an eye to Mr. Gigantus Mc Beetlepants”.
Sounds like you might have gotten rid of your ants, but if they come back and you want to use an eco and cat friendly kind of ant repellent – just spritz a bit of white vinegar around where you see them and dust some talc or baby powder around floors, doors, etc. Apparently its hard for their little feet to walk over and so they just… don’t. Worked for me and my roommate. As for the baseball sized beetle… gross. I have no idea. Good luck.
Perhaps it’s human nature to become obsessed with ousting insurgents — I was taken over by the sound of tiny mice feet in my walls this winter after they infiltrated my kitchen. My holy realm of food! I was a woman possessed. After I’d finally irradicated the vermin, I still had to sleep with a fan to drown out the noises of a house containing 4 pets, or every little stratch of a cat claw against the hard wood brought me instantly from REM to wide awake and swingin’…stupid mice.
Dude, Roomba doesn’t clean up your crumbs for you? I can’t tell you why the sudden ambush, except I’ve heard they might come in looking for water.
I’ve heard that ants don’t like wintergreen gum, but sitting a piece of gum out, all open and stuff, seems like asking for trouble to me.
The rehab aid where I work insists that a solution of liquid Dial soap and beer is fabulous for insect issues. Mix ‘er up and spray liberally in all cracks, crevices, and along baseboards. Non-toxic for the kitties, and you can drink the rest of the 6-pack in celebration of victory over the bugs! The aid who swears by this is old-school, right off the proverbial boat Portuguese. I don’t know why this makes her any sort of expert on extermination, but it somehow makes her seem more credible to me.
Yikes, but look on the bright side – in the Alien movies, Weyland-Yutani are going ape and spending millions to get their hands on a creature not unlike that, so contact your friendly local military-industrial conglomerate, and you could be made for life!
Keep in mind that there are different kind of ants. The little teeny ones are actually ATTRACTED to soap and cleaning products (as we learned to our dismay many years ago from the exterminator). That being said, I would take your ants in a HEARTBEAT in place of the freaking FLEAS we had last year. They apparently were included in the asking price of our new house and it took about $700 in bombs and sprays to get rid of them. The fuckers were resistant to EVERYTHING. Our cat reacted to the Frontline that the vet prescribed and went into neurologic failure and died within 18 hours of administering said Frontline (that stuff is pretty nasty to have the potential to do that).
Anyway…I’d be content with the ants. :-)
LOVED the thought of an ant with a surveyor’s kit, I wondered how a HERD of them found their way to my fourth floor apartment. But I got that gel-goo-whatever stuff from Target, Raid I think, dunno, it comes in a little plunger squeeze-tube, you put down a little of that and next day no more ants. No carcasses either. I’m wondering if there were even any left in the neighborhood. Very satisfying.
When I figure out how to keep the bats from getting into my a/c ducts (and then getting stuck in and flapping around in said ducts before dropping out of the vents into the fucking house), maybe I’ll send ’em over to you to eat the bugs. Everyone tells me “bats are good – they eat bugs!” NOT WHEN THEY’RE SWOOPING AROUND AND DIVE- BOMBING ME IN MY GODDAMN BEDROOM!
Until then, the only tried-and-true suggestion I have, from years of living Springtime for Ants in the suburbs, is Ye Olde Ante Trappes. I know they come in feline-friendly varieties, and they do the damn job, whether it’s the itty-bitty brown ants or the big, black carpenter variety.
Baseball Beetles? See above – only solution I got for a baseball is a bat.
Ants are clean. They’re numerous, but clean. I came home from a long weekend away, and thought, “whoa, that trash smells kind of rank.” So I hauled out the bag to put it out back.
Maggots. My trash had maggots. They fell out of the bag and onto the kitchen floor. My kitchen floor is REALLY REALLY CLEAN now. So is my trash bin. Bleached the hell out of it. I don’t know WHY I had maggots, since I haven’t eaten meat at home since I dunno when. I hate summer.
A baseball-sized beetle would be really cool. I’d like to see my dumb cat Grimmy run from that.
Ants also really dislike lavender. I had a perennial ant problem in my old house (of which, the entire gravel driveway was a giant anthill). I used to spray my kitchen round the bottoms of the walls periodically with diluted essential oil of lavender, which would clear them out for at least a week or so at a time.
Thanks for the suggestions. It’s been quiet here in Antville so far this week (knock wood) (not the part with the sorbet on it), but that beetle…yeecchhh.
The Roomba is pretty good with crumbs, but my floors are not the newest; there are some pretty big gaps between some of the floorboards, and while this does give the floor personality, of a sort, it does mean that a big Cheeto chunk (for example) can get stuck between the boards and the Roomba/my broom can’t get at it.
What do you mean, “Eat at the kitchen table”? I can’t see the TV from there.
Raid is not going to do anything to Beetletron 3K except maybe make him attempt to trample you a little faster. There is one way and one way only to dispose of giant beetles, and it involves a sure hand and a heavy shoe. Or you can trap them under a bowl and call your boyfriend to come take care of them, which is what I do when I’m feeling less than brave. (I don’t mean to keep referring to beetles in the plural so as to suggest there’s more than one…because I’m sure that’s unsettling…but from a grammar point of view it’s just less awkward somehow.)
That’s if your cats can’t manage to finish the job, which…well, I’ve read enough about your cats to know that they are entertaining, but perhaps not reliable in the pest removal department.
Try a squirt bottle of dilute Dr Bronner’s peppermint soap. That generally does the little bastards in, especially if you can get it all over where ever they’re coming from.
The beetle sounds interesting. You should capture that and send it to you favorite entomologist. I don’t know a single ento person who doesn’t get all higgledy over giant beetles, they love those damn things.
Heh. My husband and I love eating in front of the TV. We’re dreading the day that the kids are old enough to eat dinner at the same time we do, and we have to sit at the kitchen table and socialize. But at least our carpets will be cleaner.
combat disks. the little fuckers walk thru it, get coated in it, walk back to the nest and say “heeeere’s Johnny”
I see y’all’s maggots, ants, and humongous beetles and raise you CRICKETS. Those ugly, noisy fuckers invade my basement (which is finished) every year when the weather turns cold. Nothing like cleaning the cricket that your ferrets just killed out of their food bowl while they look at you like, “Dude. I had to kill that shit IN MY FOOD. You are the worst pet owner in the world.”
Bwah. Hilarious article.
On the practical side, I always have luck with liquid ant bait/poison. It’s essentially ant food with boric acid added. The ants slurp it up and carry it back to the nest to feed the queen (apparently ants are bulimic – hey, ever see a fat ant?). The acid kills a fungus in their gut that they need to help digest their food. Without the fungus, they slowly starve to death, including the queen.
Take that.
Once the queen dies, the colony is history (no more baby ants). This method, while cruel, does take a little while to work, but it’s 100% effective.
I’ve had good luck with the Combat ant traps that come in a gold box. They worked well on the non-teeny kitchen ants I had, at least. The traps can go under the kitchen sink or anywhere the cats can’t get to.
I was traumatized when I was 10 by sticking my foot into a shoe that had a humongous cricket in it. I’m glad I live somewhere now where there aren’t that many crickets. Our indoor cat would leave us piles of cricket legs as presents.
I’m kind of appalled to admit this, but I had rats last year in my somewhat crummy rental house. They showed up a few weeks after some extremely crummy neighbors were evicted. I got up one morning and discovered that all the dog treats had vanished from the top of my fridge. At first we just saw the baby rats in the trash under the kitchen sink and thought they were some kind of fuzzy mice, but not long after I saw the mother rat scurrying across the basement and put two and two together. We caught several baby rats, but never caught the mother rat, who was huge and probably too big to even fit in my friendly humane mouse/rat trap. The thought still makes me shudder. I think they probably put poison out in the house next door while it was vacant. I wouldn’t let my landlord put poison in my house because of my puppy, but something must have happened, because I haven’t seen any sign of them since.
I don’t know if this will make you feel better or worse, really, but the odds are slim to none that the queen is in your home. If they’d colonised you that hard there’d be a lot more of them and they’d have destroyed some of your stuff by now. They’re outside coming in, so sealing the entrances against antiness is the way to go.
Of course, the little fuckers are incredibly persistent. But good luck.
Window-cleaners — like Windex — seem to kill ants on contact. They just shrivel up.
Years ago I lived in the South Pacific where the cockroaches were not only huge, they FLEW. And no screens on the apartments. You didn’t even want to try stomping those suckers – if the freaky plate armor ever actually did gave way, you’d have 1) a barf-inducing crackle/crunch noise and 2) a *really* barf-inducing mess.
Jess’s bug-under-a-bowl method was my solution of choice, but being boyfriendless, I would inch the bowl bit by bit over into the closet and leave it there. Then when I was ready to move back to the States, I just had to unearth a few dessicated corpses, and all was well. Who needs to keep shoes in the closet?
This sounds really pathetic, but I find it kind of hilarious that I am currently being tormented by a ladybug. A single, really enormous, really stupid ladybug that keeps flying into my windows – *plink* – and against the overhead light – *bonk* – and then THWAPS AGAINST MY BODY AUGH AUGH GETITOFF. And yet I can’t bring myself to kill it because it’s a ladybug.
Also, at home years ago we had a dead mouse in the fifty-pound bag of dog food (it gets kept in a giant 50-gallon trash can now) and this winter my poor mom found a mousicle in front of the dryer. Our basement is where mice go to die, I guess.
Good LORD! Can’t believe you went back into the apartment! I’m phobic and I’d let the damn thing have the apartment! My sister once told her boss “You either get rid of the bug or teach it my job because its either IT or ME!!” She was quite serious.
Good luck.
For Giant Beetle Who May Be Crawling Up Your LEG RIGHT THIS MINUTE? (sorry-hehe.) An exterminator. It will be the best money you ever spent, and you can take a picture of the brave Exterminator Man holding the corpse of the beetle and than frame it and put it on the door as a warning to presumptious insects.
I can deal with little bugs, but not the HUGE FUCKING FAT-ABDOMENED SPIDER that crawled across my ceiling in my old apartment right before we moved. I shrieked like a girl and made my big strong fiance’ kill it with a shoe. We still talk about it “Man, it was so FAT! and it kept wagging its lower half back and forth as it came at us!” He lives in our memories.
The only bugs that crawl into my house are spiders, which my mother taught me never to kill because she said that they eat the ants!
We don’t have any rats in Alberta, and I have never even seen a cockroach outside of a biology lab, but we have had some record rainfall here so soon mosquitoes as large as that beetle will be hanging on all of the window screens, looking for blood.
I guess I should consider myself lucky. Crawling bugs are so much more disgusting than flying ones. At least we have screens, and DEET.
I’m itchy now.
Bugs, shmugs. Y’all are missing the important part of the post: CARL WEATHERS. Yet another reason to mourn the passing of Arrested Development.
“We’re just two adults getting a stew on!”
It makes me feel much better about my life, knowing that I am not the only one who a) has a freezer-fridge, and b) spills things and goes, “Whatever.”
That said, Raid Ant Traps really do work well.
Crickets? How about 5-inch crickets and also 7-inch millipedes that are filled with black goo that is harder to clean off brick floors than spilled, dried sorbet? But that’s nothing compared to the 5-or-so-inch centipedes that can sting. Most of these, however, can be dispatched by the kitten-sized chameleons (when their tails are curled) or the regular gecko-sized geckos that will live in your house if you let them. They like drapes. Also, monitor lizards are big. Welcome to Windhoek, Namibia.
I am not exaggerating for effect when I say that I physically recoiled from the screen and stared at it with my mouth hanging open for two minutes when I read the bit about beetle. The size of a BASEBALL!?
We had two ant infestations in the last house I occupied. One, we uncovered within three days of moving in, in the kitchen around the fridge, which explained the giant tub of ant killing powder the landlord had thoughtfully left under the sink, like, thanks for sharing this little detail about the house with us before we signed the lease.
I attracted the second one, because it occured around my laptop, in front of which I spend about 12 hours a day, and I need to eat in that time, and crumbs get dropped. I saw an ant here and an ant there as I was working on it, and then one evening came home and found the whole room swarming with them. Ants on the carpet, ants crawling up and down the legs of the coffee table, ants ON the coffee table, ants all over my laptop and crawling in between the keys, ants trying to get into the half empty can of Diet Coke that was there, ants seemingly COMING UP THROUGH THE CARPET – seriously, little blacks dots would just appear out of nowhere on the (cream) carpet and then dart away. I went berserk and anyone who looked in our front window in the following ten minutes would have seen a grown man on the floor smacking a copy of How To Program in Java furiosuly against the carpet and shouting “Die, you fuckers!”. Then I grabbed every cleaning product in the house and went to town on the room, vacuumed the living hell out of the carpet and spent the next three months barking at anyone who left so much as a candy wrapper out. God, I hate insects.
Speaking of “bugs o’ terror” I went to a wedding in Zambia a few years back and we stayed on one of those safari ranches in the middle of nowhere. This bug flew in through the door, it was enormous, it was striped, it buzzed and it had tentacles. The boyf and I spent the entire night tryig to kill this bug by drowning it in pesticide and stomping on it several times and it JUST WOULDN’T DIE! Finally, we had to cut it into pieces while reading snatches of the holy bible to exorcise it’s evil little soul (okay, maybe not the bible bit). Damn vampire bug from hell.
Tipp: It’s getting even bigger in my memory, AND it has a soundtrack: “Berserker” from Clerks. And that candy-wrapper thing is totally me right now; I hear someone drinking a soda on the PHONE and I’m like, “Don’t forget to rinse that can. …No, seriously.”
In Hobey’s defense, he probably could have caught it if he were on his own (he nailed a mosquito once, God bless his little orange heart), but the zone defense got a little hectic and the B3K was able to escape.
Growing up in Florida I made my peace with many varieties of giant bug, not to mention little frogs that would get in somehow and chill in the shower — “Hey! Moist enough in here for ya?” — and on one memorable occasion, a snake in the toilet. Then I moved to New England, and became acquainted with… the HOUSE CENTIPEDE. Do a Google image search on those bastards, they are VILE. They run fast, and they’ve got weird fake antennae coming out of their asses, and SO MANY LEGS that bend up and look all spiky and ew. Ew ew ew.
So, my college had one kind of old a run-down dormitory called East Quad that was infested with these, thus they became known as East bugs. I have seen them only rarely, but once one ran across the counter and into the sink at my boyfriend’s old apartment. I freaked out, then had the wherewithal to spray it hard with water, knock it into the drain, and run the disposal. Die, bug.
Spiders are cool with me as long as they are not a) in the shower with me (I’m naked here! So vulnerable!) or b) above my face on the ceiling while I’m trying to sleep. A little one had a teeny web next the the toilet paper dispenser at previous-mentioned bf’s apartment, and I’d say hi to her every time I went in to pee.
Speaking of Sorbet, have you tried the Blood Orange sorbet by Ciao Bella? Yummmmmm…..
I started getting ants in my apartment about 2 months ago (they first showed up in the bathroom, but have ventured a little farther afield). I put out the ant bait thingies near water sources. Then there were these wing-ed creatures that seemed to come in from the living room window (I live on the ground floor). I had no bug spray so I drowned/poisoned them in my mildew spray. Finally, I just got my paperwork together, called a realtor and a mortgage guy and have dedicated myself to finding an affordable condo.
Oh god, the memories, they’re all flooding back!
2 years ago I was sitting home alone when a giant flying cockroach FLEW INTO MY FACE AND GOT STUCK IN MY HAIR! I started running around screaming and trying to wap the giant bird-sized bastard without squishing it into my hair while it was making this awful ‘skreeeee!’ sound until it managed to free itself and fly away. I spent the next hour chasing it around the room with a can of Raid that seemed to be having no effect whatsoever.
Yes, where I used to live has giant flying SCREAMING cockroaches. Like gaint and flying isn’t enough.
Dude, what _is_ it with Rocky movies being on TV lately? I swear I had never seen any of them other than maybe the first, once a very long time ago…and now I’ve seen all four multiple times and can discuss the finer points of Mr. T vs. Russian Dude vs. Apollo. I mean, they’ve been on, in order, all of them, multiples times a weekend, like every weekend since Mother’s Day….and if we miss one or part of one because we actually have a life, it’s graciously on again when we get back. I mean, I _love_ the robot and all, but it seems like I should be able to find _something_ to watch on my 100+ channels other than a Rocky movie!!
And ants? Well, I still don’t like them in my house, but they _are_ “clean” insects in that at least they’re not bringing diseases with them (roaches, rats…)…but yeah…find the point of entry and spray there…doesn’t matter much to get them where they’re eating…might be satisfying to watch the little suckers die, but there are _always_ more ants.
Oh great, now I’m having flashbacks to my first apartment. We had an old orange shag carpet a roommate’s mother had kindly donated, which our roaches loved to the point that at night the shag would SWAY like a gentle breeze over fields of prairie grain.
Anyway. Thanks for the article. You seem to have tapped into everyone’s nightmares. :)
The glamorous post-Apollo-Creed life of Carl Weathers.
I had a several-inch-long one of these in my apartment once… *shiver*
Good lord, y’all have scarred me for life with all of your insect war stories. I choose to live by the credo, the only good insect is a dead insect, and if I must kill one, I need a very stiff drink immediately afterwards. I’m going to have the heebie-jeebies for the rest of the day now, but I commend you all on your bravery in dealing with them!