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
My parents house have a mice problem in their house. Worst thing ever was when I was down in the basement doing some laundry. I was like, 14. I pulled out a “fuzzy sock” only to find out it was a dead mouse that had gone through the wash cycle. Apparently the lid of the washing maching got left open, the little fucker fell in and proceded to have a wet, violent death. Very traumatizing for me. Mom thought it was funny as hell though.
When I was a teenager, I was a bit messy. Not garbage and food everywhere messy, just everything I own is on my floor and it takes a certain amount of experience to know where to step to get to the bed messy. We had small infestation of teeny-tiny brown ants. At least I thought it was a small infestation, because when I went to empty out my childhood bookcase to make room for a new set of more “adult” furniture, I found that a now-absent colony of ants had made their home in a shelf of old VHS tapes. Not around the tapes, not behind the tapes, but INSIDE the tapes. I think it was home base for raids to far and distant lands, like the bathroom and kitchen, because I’d never seen an ant in that room before. Oh well, it was a good reason to buy DVD versions of everything, anyway.
Leigh, the bird story reminded me of a time we were playing host to my MIL’s dog for two weeks. She managed to find a dead bird on her daily walk, and while we always managed to prevent her carrying it home with us, she became obsessed with it. She kept looking for her “prize” long after some other dog must have carried it off home.
As for flying roaches, they still scare the crap out of me, but living in Texas means I’ve learned not to scream out loud. We had a friend of a friend (born and raised East Coaster) stay with us for a couple days last summer, and he screamed a high pitched scream when he saw one.
“What the hell was that?”
“Oh, just a flying roach!”
“Just a flying roach?!?!”
“Yeah, no big. They never get inside, we have exterminators come in once a month to spray the place up, and it keeps them away”.
“Wow, you sound really casual about this.”
“Oh, not really. I’ve just gotten past the being constantly terrified stage, to the ‘pretend I didn’t really see that’ stage”
0oooooo
Odoriferous house ants are, unfortunately, aptly named. They’re also teeny-tiny so you’ll be on the couch watching Jon Stewart and casually touch that little itch on your chin — and then the SMELL comes and you’ll realize an ant was crawling on your face. Ugh. “They” say the ants smell like rotten coconut, but it’s a very formaldehydey smell to me.
>> Speaking of sorbet, have you tried the Blood Orange sorbet by Ciao Bella? Yummmmmm…..
Ambrosia! Put a couple of scoops in a glass and top with ginger ale and a shot of vodka for a perfect summer cocktail. Just don’t spill any on your desk.
Oh, man. I grew up in an old, decrepit house. The attic crawlspace was totally unused, other than by nesting birds and squirrels and such. The ceiling tiles had water damage and had cracks and bulges in them where, not very often, black widows used to crawl out. And then they’d drop on me, while I was tucked in bed. I’d see something small and black and shiny out of the corner of my eye, and it would take a second before I realized OH JIMINY BIG SPIDER! I got better and better at smashing them before they dropped as I got older.
Later on, we got mice. Our kitten Ajax, before he was even full grown, started catching them, killing them, and throwing them in the toilet. We’d wake up and the first person in the bathroom would tell everyone else the night’s hunting tally. A year later, we got a second kitten, whom Ajax used to flush mice out from behind the stove, into his waiting jaws. Funniest damn thing it was, too.
Bonus: when we moved, we found three fake toy mousies behind my parents’ dresser…and five real live dead and dessicated corpse mousies. This, perhaps, provides a clue to Ajax’s thought process.
I don’t know if this helps, but when ants tried to get into my frog’s aquarium for the water, I put a line of Vaseline along the base. They can’t climb through it…unless, of course, several get stuck and die and the others can climb on their bodies. So it’s kind of a last ditch thing because: ew.
Reading all these posts has brought back so many traumatic insect-related memories: the ginormous roach that flew across the darkened kitchen and landed in the sink just as I switched the light on… the wasp that was crawling on a wire fence that I didn’t see until I grabbed said fence and was stung… the periodic infestations of crickets or green grasshoppers and the F-16-sized mosquitoes in my college town… and ant balls. *shudder*
I’m not sure what I’d do if a beetle almost large enough to be manufactured by Volkswagen came scuttling across my living room floor — probably run screaming from the building — but I’ve heard that spraying vinegar works for ants. Smells bad, but keeps them away.
Ugh all these bug stories have me itching too… personally i’m okay with anything that doesn’t scuttle or fly at my face. I can trap spiders, slugs, beetles and the like and release them into the garden (whereupon they come straight back into my house)
The only cockroach I ever saw in my house received a faceful of sneaker.
But what I can’t deal with is mice. I opened up the bin cupboard once and had one fall onto my bare foot and I very nearly shot straight through the ceiling…
The second time I saw a mouse in my house was when the cat was up on the bureau knocking over pictures and generally making a mess. I look behind the dresser and there’s a little string, I pull it, it’s a tail, and out pops the mouse.
I shriek and take refuge on the kitchen counter, the Master of Disaster sits on the kitchen floor and starts washing his face. I nudge him towards the mouse with the toe of my shoe and he looks at me like ‘what are you expecting ME to do about this?’
Finally after a few more nudges he hefts himself off the floor walks to the mouse and sits on it. Not quite what I had in mind, but it seemed to do the trick, we haven’t seen any mice since.
Also i’m never living where Maria is, because bats in the bedroom = I’m moving out.
Re: What ever happened to Carl Weathers, anyway?
Adam Sandler happened to Carl Weathers, is what happened. Happy Gilmore and Little Nicky? Not that they weren’t cool roles, but now way can “Chubbs” compare to “Apollo”.
In my apartment we have a huge silverfish problem. Raid put around the baseboards seems to work for about two weeks or so and then they come back. I did some research and discovered that while original infestations are generally due to poor hygiene, once they’re there, it’s almost impossible to get rid of them because a. they can live for SIX MONTHS without food and b. they can live quite happily on hair and dust. So unless you can manage to never drop a hair on the floor or any accumulation of dust whatsoever for half a year — those fuckers are coming back.
At least they seem to stick to the bathroom. I’ve only seen them in the bedroom once or twice in three years, and in the kitchen only on the floor — they’re not interested in people food, thank god.
BLACK WIDOW.
That’s what the hubby found on our porch this AM. Big, shiny, killer spider. Grreaaat.
I have to admit, it was a lot better than seeing a scorpion. It was pretty, for a spider. Delicate. But then hubby sent me a little factiod about how now is mating season, and the female will lay up to 9 egg sacks each of which hold appx 700 tiny deadly spiders. Oh, but only a dozen or so will survive from each sack due to cannibalism.
I’m not messing with that. No natural remedies, nope. I’m hiring an exterminator today. Sweet lord.
Ah, all these fond memories. Is this the funniest thread ever or what? Jade, the mental picture of your cat sitting on the mouse really made my day.
Speaking of ant balls (eurgh), anyone remember the “Ants in Pants” episode of The Tick?
Back to Captain Sanity’s Superhero Sanitarium ….
I swear to God, this story, and the subsequent comments, have sent me into a rocking fetal position, sucking my thumb, and trying (yet failing) to find my happy place.
I woke up once to a cockroach crawling ACROSS MY FACE! This was a mere twenty years after being swarmed with fire ants growing up in Texas. I have not yet had sufficient time to recover from either incident.
Sars, the only thing to do, besides, of course, MOVE, is fog bomb the shit out of your apartment. Take the cats and relocate, set off a few fog bombs, come back in 48 hours and you should be good.
J.F.:
It’s something about electricity that ants like. A friend of mine had them in her well pump, and every day they’d have to go out and scrape dead ants out of the pump, because they were going in and dying in such numbers that they were shorting out the motor.
As someone who faced an ant invasion last year (vinegar is a miracle worker, btw), I feel I have a duty to warn you about something you may not have considered; even though the ants appear to be gone, check your cupboards. Ants LOVE dry foods (flour, dry cereals, cornmeal, etc) and will often crawl inside a bag of, say, oatmeal, and die. And then early one morning, looong after all the ants have gone, you’ll be pouring a nice bowl of oatmeal for your breakfast and you’ll see a speck of something black – is it a little burnt piece of oatmeal? Is it a bit of dirt from the bowl? No, IT IS A DEAD ANT. And look, he had a friend! I ended up chucking out all my flour and sugar and cereal, and I now keep anything dry in big ziploc freezer bags. Too many bad memories.
I’m never going to forget one time with a couple of my friends. I’d just picked them up from the airport and we’d returned to their apartment to veg for a bit before I went home. I was lying on the couch, the female friend was in a chair to the side, and the male friend in another room. About the time I noticed the huge black ant walking on my leg and levitated in my efforts to remove it, I heard a bloodcurdling yell from the bedroom. Turns out they’d left a trash bag of soda cans sitting the week they were gone, and the big black ants were everywhere. I’ve never seen anyone go as ballistic as Ed, stomping all over the place. I went home and brought back my can of Raid, whereupon he started drowning each and every one he found in a puddle of liquid Raid. I know they got rid of them eventually, though the first day is all we ever talk about.
Other than ant infestations and a mouse I didn’t know I had until my cat killed it, I’ve been pretty lucky. Then again, I don’t know what I might have now… I just moved into an 85-year-old house that had the same owners from 1954 until earlier this year. Here’s hoping, though.
My ant remedies mostly consisted of drowning, squishing, or otherwise killing all the ones I saw (most times I’d get them on my kitchen counters), plus spraying Raid near what entrances I could find, and in later years I switched to the ant traps where they take something back to the nest. I apparently cured my mom’s kitchen ant problem by putting a trap in the basement, though my purpose at the time was to get rid of the ones down there that were competing for my cats’ food. The cats really didn’t know what to do about the ants. But, but–moooommmm!!! They’re in my FOOD!
I hate centipedes so much – I used to see babies in the basement when doing laundry, and loved the spring and the fall, when you’d turn on the heat or AC for the first time in months and a heeeeeeeeeyoooooooouge one would come strolling out of the ceiling vent all “uh, trying to nap in there, hoss.†Speeyaaaack!!! By the way, if you spray them with Raid? They curl up, fall off the ceiling, and FLAIL. And then? They DISSOLVE. It’s the grossest thing in the universe.
I love praying mantis! (…es?) Now there’s a “bug that eats other more annoying bugs†that I can get behind! Our neighbor caught a baby one when we were little, and we kept him for a pet – just for the summer. His favorite food was the daddy longlegs that lived in our swingset fort. He cleaned that place out for us, big time. He’d rip all the legs off and slurp them up like spaghetti, then pick up the fat round body like a hamburger and bite it right between the eyes. Awesome. (sorry, Sars. Heh.) For a bug, he was sort of cuddly. We could hold him and everything, he never tried to bite us. We let him go at the end of summer so he could reproduce and die (as they do). If you could buy them I’d get twelve to keep my apartment pest free!
I like mice, because I am a weirdo. I mean, I don’t LIKE having my house infested with them (and never have had that, knock on wood) but I used to have mice for pets, so I wouldn’t run screaming. I think they’re cute.
If you don’t like killing them, here’s a great mousetrap you probably have in your house right now:
http://www.smithsax.btinternet.co.uk/products.htm
It’s really easy, and it works! Release them at least a mile from your house if you can, look for a wooded area not right on top of a bunch of houses.
So, stupidly, i clicked on the “ant ball” link, and I now feel sick, and itchy all over.
But I’ll take your giant beetle, and flying cockroaches, and raise you a weta.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta
I have had a horrible fear of spiders since I was a tween — stems from when I was weeding in our front flowerbeds as punishment and got bitten by THREE spiders at once.
In college, my boyfriend dropped me off at home after a weekend trip. I hauled my suitcase up the stairs, still wearing my little black dress and heels, and came upon a spider the size of my PALM on the landing. I tried to handle it myself by spraying it with bug spray, but it just looked at me and laughed and started to crawl away. I knew if it got away, I’d have to move, because the idea of that stupid arachnid crawling on me in my sleep just made me want to die. So I called my boyfriend and made him come back and kill the spider. I also took a PHOTO of the spider because I was afraid no one would believe me about how big it was, ha.
There are lots of things I am completely self-reliant about, and I can kill most bugs without issue. Spiders turn me into a quivering helpless little girl. I thank God I have a significant other who’s willing to kill the creepy-crawlies for me. I just can’t handle it and don’t care what that says about me as a modern woman :)
I’m not a great lover of any bugs, and my general policy is see it, kill it, flush it, end of discussion. This has worked fairly well in my apartment, I’m glad to say.
However, there are some environments where you just cannot avoid pests, and Ontario cottage country is one of them. Blackfly-deerfly-horsefly seasons, mosquitos big & aggressive enough to carry you off, highly excitable wasps & yellowjackets that dive bomb. (Then there are the rodents – do not get me started.) But nothing – nothing, I say – touches the Dock Spider.
I have no problem with spiders in general. However, an exception is most definitely made for the giant, black, hairy beastie that is a Dock Spider. Imagine, if you will, sitting at night on a gently bobbing dock with your friends, getting steadily drunker as the evening progresses, and enjoying the hell out of it, when all of a sudden, you lift your beer bottle, and there is an EFFIN YOOGE fuzzball of a spider on the neck. Into the lake they go, bottle & spider together. You look over the edge with a torch to see what happened to the spider, and discover….a dinner-plate-sized colony of fuzzy black things clinging to the side of the dock. You then give up waterskiing & spend the rest of the weekend on the deck. At least the wasps can be sprayed with Raid.
Man…at least you don’t have mice. Mice in our apartment turned me from a humanitarian, tree-hugging vegetarian into a vengeful, mouse-trapping, mouse-drowning (in the dog’s water bowl), mouse-seeking, mousie morticianizing vegetarian.
We are traumatized. Our dog. Didn’t. Notice.
Oh, man. The two things guaranteed to bring out “Oh MAN wait until you hear THIS” responses are Huge Bug Stories and Huge Zit Stories.
As for mine: Houston, TX. Flying cockroach. In my shoe. More than once.
Lianne: if you want to keep ants out of your cats’ food, try Vaseline. Just coat the outside of the bottom rim of their food bowls with the stuff, and the little buggers won’t be able to climb up and munch away. Works like a charm.
My bug-related story? While getting dressed for school one day at age 8 or so, I felt something twitch on my leg as I stepped into my jeans. I immediately yanked them off and found a COCKROACH ON MY LEG. That had been HIDING IN MY JEANS. I need a shower just thinking about that one. Gah.
Ann, I once found a black widow, in its web, living inside a big head of broccoli my mom had just cut in our garden. She was cradling an armload of broccoli against her and I noticed that there was a spider living amongst the stalks. Closer inspection revealed its black-with-red-hourglass coloring, which, gah, I get the wiggins just thinking about it.
Ants are the norm where I live, especially this time of year… evidently they are some breeed of Argentinian ants that hitched a ride on a freighter in the 50s, and now? When ants from strange colonies meet, rather than killing each other and keeping the population down, they do the stranger-in-a-strange-land thing and join up colonies. All ants are friends in my town. And they all need to party in my bathroom.
We don’t normally get outsize roaches, but one day my bf opened a box we’d gotten from Florida, and an average-size roach ran out. We yelled, we stomped, we chased, and finally trapped him under the throw rug. We formed our positions, and on three, BF whooshed the rug and I pointed the Raid… at nothing. Bug vanished. There was nowhere for him to go, he just vanished. We gave up.
A year later, we are in the middle of moving, making battle plans at 11:00pm on what was going to be a long night of packing and cleaning. BF is telling me something important, and I interrupt… pointing… babbling.. can’t even form words. There, on a box across the room, was the roach. He’s back. And he’s the size of a HUMVEE. He had grown all up and made his appearance on the last night, in all his grody glory. Once again with the screaming and stomping, only this time the bug ran into the sliding screen track. It took the BF about a dozen tries, banging the screen down with all his force, to get Bugzilla to die. Even then, I thought I saw the screen heave up later.
If we hadn’t been so afraid he would get in our stuff and come along, I would have left him there as a parting gift to our lovely landlord. I just hope he knocked up some of the little local roaches for her before he died!
Just reminded of an incident I had forgotten… or maybe suppressed.
I was driving in my car when a giant mofo spider scuttled across the INSIDE of the windscreen. That was very nearly an international incident in itself. But then I pulled over and rush hour commuters got treated to the very ‘Basil Fawlty-esque’ sight of me running around my car in circles flailing at it with a palm frond and yelling ‘DIE YOU BASTARD DIE!’
This was my scenario:
8 months pregnant with twins, 9:30 on a mid-summer’s night in post-Katrina New Orleans, one-bedroom apartment. I’m reading, my husband’s on the computer. I glance past him and ask what that is on the kitchen floor. His response?
A snake. A 3-foot long python, actually.
We sorta freak out, grab our cell phones and head into the hall. He calls his dad, I call 911. (After a moment of thinking, “What, exactly, does one DO about this?”) Two of his brothers show up, wielding a shovel and a variety of golf clubs. And then FINALLY the police show up… two young female officers. Who wouldn’t even COME INTO THE APARTMENT. We all just kinda lurked around and watched the thing slink under the fridge. Thankfully, two macho just-going-off-duty Officer Tight-Shirts show up, yank the fridge out of the corner, and grab the snake like freakin’ Steve Irwin. One asked if I minded if he kept the snake. I was like, “MIND?!? What ELSE did you think I was gonna do with it?? TAKE IT!”
And then at 12:30 a.m., the SPCA (whom the first two officers had called) called me back to see “if there was anything they could do.” Too little, too late, guys.
For about a month, my husband couldn’t sit at the computer without jerking his head around spastically any time he *thought* he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. And we had to check the tucked-in sheets at the bottom of the bed before we got in.
I tried to reassure myself by thinking, “These things are NOT indigenous to New Orleans!”
insects are disturbing- especially those base-ball sized variants.
however- rodents i believe are worse in some respects… and peacocks are even nastier.
peacocks have not yet invaded the confines of the aboad i now reside in- full of holes, gaps, cracks and fissures…
though the day i do is the day i’ll purchase an air and begin my career moonlighting as a professional peacock assassin.
and the rodents.
ever watch a rodent fall in a bucket of bleach?
i’m sure your irradiated super-roach of a pest would fair just as well.
I’ve just joined the group of people who are currently sitting at their desks, twiching slightly and trying not to scratch the phantom itches on their legs caused by imaginary bugs climbing inside their pant legs.
michelel72, could your ‘weird cricket/beatle things’ possible have been camelback crickets? We used to get those all the time at my parents’ house, and they creep the ever-living poop out of me.
I knew it. I just knew if I kept reading your comments section someone would mention.. ugh I even hate to type the word… spiders.
I won’t be able to sleep now.
Your story was very entertaining, though.
Can’t help with the ants, but I saw on tv that you can kill slugs with beer. They love the smell of it so much they’ll jump in and drown.
Beetle’s don’t do anything. In fact, my sister kept a huge pet bettle in grade school. Ate leaves. Died when she tried to take it on an airplane trip, pretty harmless.
I have also seen the New England centipedes, and they are the ugliest things ever. I once woke up in the middle of the night to see a 6 inch specimen scuttle across my chair, I had insomnia the rest of the summer.
But nothing beats scorpions, or a scorpion sting. They’re fast and scary and painful. The only time I’ve been caught alone with one, I managed to throw the yellow pages on top of it from a distance. Which was followed by the white pages. And Bartlett’s Quotations…and the hardcover Riverside Chaucer. And I moved out to the living room, because there was no way in hell I was risking another encounter.
Sitting on the computer last night, bare foot on the floor, not bothering anyone. An ant climbs up onto my foot and BITES MY TOE. I didn’t even provoke the thing! I mean, it would be one thing if I were scuffing my foot around their hill or something, but to climb up my stationary foot and bite my toe? That’s quite another.
I blame this thread.
I generally have a policy with bugs and rodents of all kinds: as long as you stick to your side of the wall, we’re good. Make an appearance on my side and you get terminated with extreme prejudice.
Most bugs don’t bother me. Two exceptions to this: camelback crickets (although I never knew what they were called until I read these comments!), which jump like a mofo. They don’t scare me, but they do squick me out; it’s always an adventure to kill one.
The other exception? Centipedes. These scared me. These still scare me to this day. Each dorm in my college had like it’s official mascot insect, one that seemed to infest only that dorm. Of course, I would pick the one that was infested with centipedes to live in my junior year. One day, I saw a giant specimen dash out from under my bed. I shrieked and jumped about 10 feet in the air and the RA came running and killed it. While I was trying to get my heart rate back under control, and he was teasing me for shrieking like the girl I was, an even more gigantic specimen ran out from under the bed (what, were they doing the horizontal mambo under there?!) The RA and I both shrieked and jumped 10 feet in the air. He killed it, but he never teased me again!
I’ve lived in Texas pretty much my whole life, and can second the comments of those who go on about the large and nasty bugs we have here. Giant flying cockroaches (aka palmetto bugs)? Check. Fire ants? Check. Disease-bearing mosquito varieties? Check. Scorpions? Check. Fleas? Check. Ticks? Check. Wasps, hornets, dirt daubers, and bumblebees? Check. Numerous other, less offensive species are equally happy to come visit your home and garden. We also have four different kinds of poisonous snakes, but you don’t see those so much in urban areas. One thing we don’t have (at least in my personal experience) are large centipedes, for which I am profoundly grateful, because those things freak me right the fudge out, for whatever reason.
All of this is pretty hard on my husband, who is from Scotland and (after nearly 7 years of living in Texas) considers large / poisonous insects to be an unnatural abomination. Apparently, Scotland is seriously bug- and snake-deficient (my visits there confirm this). When we got married, I agreed to take on all bug-killing duties in our marriage, a contract I have faithfully kept. However, it’s hard not to laugh when someone gets freaked out by MOTHS. Not because he’s worried that they might eat our clothes, but because they’re FLYING BUGS.
Anyway, I have had a few encounters with small ants and silverfish trying to set up shop in my abode, and have found boric acid to be extremely effective. You can buy a big plastic squeezy bottle of it for
My missed opportunity to win big bucks from Funniest Home Videos:
After recently moving, husband and I are watching TV one night when we spot a mouse zip across the kitchen floor toward the refrigerator. Husband, who is a mouse sympathizer, wants to get a peek at the little critter and so gets a long stick and lays down on the kitchen floor while poking and peeking under the fridge. I am watching from a safe distance thinking this should be good. He says, “What happens if it comes—EEEAAAAAA!!” He jumps up and freezes for a minute with his arms stretched out trying to figure out what happened (mouse is somewhere on his person trying to hide). The husband, (a London transplant) screams “BLOODY HELL!!” and starts doing the crazy dance as the cute little mouse, runs up his back-inside the shirt. He rips off the shirt (with about 10 more bloody hells), mouse hits the floor and shoots under the dishwasher. Former mouse sympathizer set out the traps that night (offending rodent bit the cheese soon after).
“And then early one morning, looong after all the ants have gone, you’ll be pouring a nice bowl of oatmeal for your breakfast and you’ll see a speck of something black – is it a little burnt piece of oatmeal? Is it a bit of dirt from the bowl? No, IT IS A DEAD ANT.”
During one of the above-mentioned infestations in my parents’ house I poured out a bowl of Raisin Bran and almost immediately realized that the cereal was moving. Yep, ants were crawling out of the bowl by the dozen. Urgh. Put me off Raisin Bran for quite a while, let me tell you.
Jenny from New Orleans – my God. I think I’d have gone into labour out of sheer panic. Here in Toronto a bunch of tenants in a rooming house had to leave their building for five months because a guy living in the attached house next door had a pet cobra and it escaped. It still hasn’t been found, I don’t think, but they’ve all moved back in because it’s assumed the snake is dead by now. Not an assumption I’d be willing to live with, if it were me. Crazy snake charmer guy is in jail and had to pay nearly $20K in lost rent to the landlord of the rooming house, but who the hell keeps a cobra as a pet?
EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Never had to deal with roaches before moving to LA. The large ones you get in Florida and the south might be disgusting, but personally, I’ll take them over the swarming herds of small cockroaches you get in old buildings.
I once had to take apart the phone in my office after I watched two baby roaches crawl out of it one day. I then spent the next twenty minutes frantically beating the phone against the side of the trash can to get the OTHER 40,000,000,000 baby roaches and roach eggs out of it. I also found that they had infested an old laptop computer after unexpectedly entering the office after dark one night, and seeing them scuttle BACK INTO IT THROUGH THE KEYBOARD. Eeeeeeeuuuuurgrgggrggggggghhhhhh.
After I left that job (not because of the roaches, but it didn’t help), the person who took over my office cleaned bunch of binders and books off a large bookshelf, and disturbed what was practically the second coming of the Mayan empire, in roach form. Seriously, they’d begun to develop the printing press back there. Glad I wasn’t there for that episode.
Could be worse: you could be living in the UK(as I do) and wake up one morning to find your house infested by slugs(I wish I were making this up. UGH!)! It DOES get rainy, over here…
By the way, thank you for making your misery sound so funny! I tried to fight the laughter, but I sprayed my computer screen with Diet Coke(the drink of champions!), when I got to the Hokey-Pokey bit…
I read through the entire comments section and cannot believe that no one has mentioned…
ticks.
I’ve lived in Tennessee my whole life. You live near the woods, you get ticks. You go to the woods, you get ticks. You go near woods, you get ticks.
I had to have one surgically removed from my leg as a kid when it broke off before I even knew I’d been bitten. I had a weird cut on my leg that wasn’t healing right, and when I started to run a high fever for no apparent reason they found out that the little bastard’s head had just kept going through nearly half an inch of thigh meat. I still have the scar. Eeh.
When I lived in the woods, we got ticks in the house. Nothing — nothing, ever — has grossed me out as much as picking a tick the size of a Superball off a dog, which must be done but gives you about 50/50 odds that it will pop in the process and you’ll be Carrie at the prom.
The next worst thing is the seed tick, which is teeeeeeeny (and thus The “OMG that is a seed tick and it is IN MY PUBES HELP” response fades over time, I’ve learned. Blessedly, my cats kill every bug that ever blunders into my house, and I now have to drive a good way to get to the woods.
Yes, this is Mrs. Ipstenu, whom Ipstenu has mentioned all over the internet. Yeah, I know, I’m famous.
I also share your deep, deep loathing for anything with too many legs, too few legs, too much slime, too many scales, reptilian… Okay, I sound less like you, more like Adrian Monk. Still. Baseball sized beetle and his prehistoric ancestor is familiar to me. I know that little bugger. Or, at least, I knew his grandaddy. When I was a little kid in the South, we had a screen door with a gigantic hole in it. One day I walked into my kitchen — KITCHEN — and found out what made the hole. Its head was the size of a ping pong ball. Its body was the size of an apple. In fact, the color of it was a lot like a Granny Smith apple, and I can’t eat those anymore.
Its every step sounded like a toddler with her first pair of tap shoes. I didn’t stick around to find out whether it had six legs or eight. I screamed bloody blue murder, and wet myself as I scrambled back to the bedroom to crawl out the window and hotfoot it over to a neighbor’s house to call my father to come home from work and kill the beast. Now, you have to understand, my dad was not going to leave a little bitty kid at home, especially not one that’s of wetting-herself age. No. I wasn’t wetting-herself age. I was thirteen. But pee I did, when I saw the mean and determined expression on Bugzilla’s face. It looked exactly like one of the cheerleaders in my class, mad as heck and just sure that I was the one responsible for the gum in her pompoms, and hellbent on exacting revenge by telling everyone in the seventh grade that I farted during gym class (which I didn’t take, because I was in marching band, and that’s enough exercise for anyone) or something. That’s what this bug looked like. Evil, nasty, and delighted with all the fear and shame it was putting me through.
And then my dad couldn’t come home and kill it, because he’d just started his shift, so I had to go BACK IN THE HOUSE, past the Craftmatic Adjustable Transformer Bug Cheerleader, and get a shower to clean off the pee (naked in the house with the Fourth Bug of the Apocalypse), and dress, and go to school with wet hair because there was no way on God’s green earth that I was going to remember to dry my hair, or even put on a bra, or remember to get my backpack and bring my materials to school.
Good times.