A Bug's Life

Before I moved to the Great State of Texas, I had heard that everything is bigger here.  That could be both good and bad.  Bigger burger?  Excellent. Bigger tornadoes? Not so excellent.  Bigger trucks and SUVs? Questionable.  Bigger bugs? Resoundingly no. However, in the past 15 months I have seen barely any bugs to take note of.  Until this past week. 

Last week, I had just sat on the floor to log into the internet and I look to my left and realize that creepy someones-watching-me feeling was due to the steroid enhanced cricket sitting on my floor.  Maybe he was an ex-con cricket who was doped up on tranquilizers though, because he didn't put up any fight until I had him captured in a Glad Ware container.  I decided to be magnanimous and sent him flying over the balcony railing to duke it out with the mockingbirds and coyotes. Now, I've noticed more crickets in stairwells and inside buildings with automatic doors lately.  I'm not sure if they're channeling the Barrel of Monkey brigade from Toy Story and standing on one another's shoulders (do crickets have shoulders?) while waving their antenna frantically in front of the sensors or if they're slipping in when people enter and exit.  He was the only one who has invaded the apartment so far. I trust he reported back to the troops and they're plotting as I type how to cause an Old Testament Egyptian style plague on PT Girl and I's apartment.

Crickets I can handle.  Maybe not in droves, but they're better than locusts. Or cockroaches.

I don't care what you call a cockroach...water bug, saw palmetto bug. They're cockroaches and they skeeve me out. I had only ever seen them occasionally and always as I was passing though. Imagine my level of girly-ness when yesterday morning as I'm sitting at my desk getting ready to start the day, coffee brewing, and the mother of all cockroaches pokes it's ugly head out from behind the rolling desk next to me.  It was the size of Matron Mama Morton without the sass that Kander and Ebb infused her with. I immediately became a quintessential picture of "save me now" girl and had both feet on the chair with me and had propelled my chair into the middle of the office.  As the roach is scurrying my way I'm making a weird siren like sound while cursing my magnificent propulsion ability as I am now not within arms length of anything that makes a good weapon.  All I have are my beloved Reef flip-flops and I could not, absolutely could not, step on Mama.  The imagined sound of it was making me sick to my stomach as I wailed. This was not a decision based on empathy toward all living creatures.  Believe me, I wanted her dead.

After Mama disappears under another desk I kind of just sat and twitched a little.  My audiology cohort, Miss C, comes in and once I fill her in on our intruder and possible hostage situation that could occur - Mama was that big - she also made a weird siren sound.  Since we didn't have our roach-vision goggles on us at the time, we just gingerly sat at our desks with our feet propped up.  I should make it clear at this point that where I work is extremely clean and they had been pulling some network lines from the walls this week, and that's where I suspect Mama lived.
 
I was headed up front to wait for an early patient when I hear alarming distress signals coming from the back office.  I run, as well as I ever do which means I didn't trip and break anything, back to the office where Miss C has also propelled herself into the middle of the office and is mumbling incoherently about Mama being under her desk.  I sprint to the kitchen and throw open cupboards attempting to find some sort of disposable container to trap the little lady in (Mama, not Miss C) until one of the maintenance men can come stomp on her head.  I come back with a cup that stops the incoherent rambling when Miss C looks at me like I've lost my mind.  True, it was small.  And Mama would have just moved the cup with her.  I run back to another closet and I can here the fugitive update behind me "It's headed to the bathroom!  The bathroom!  Stop it!".  I dump a million stickers out of a rubbermaid container and as I duck and roll past the bathroom I toss it on top of Mama. Seriously, I don't know why Ft Worth SWAT hasn't asked me to be part of the team.  Maybe because I make siren sounds when faced with insects? That distraction might be just the thing needed in a hostile stand-off.

One of our Maintenance Men came in and really just laughed at us in Spanish while Miss C and I sat on our chairs with our feet up off the floor as he humanely gassed Mama. No last rites were given as she had a crazy look in her eye and couldn't be counted upon to give a straight answer regarding her sins. He was sweet enough to flush the toilet twice after and then pronounced the deceased "Muerto".

I now fully understand Gina's break-down on ANTM Season 7...although I didn't have a Jade exacerbating the process.