My Rant on Roaches

Warning: This post is not for the weak of stomach or easily disgusted.

Keep in mind, we live in Texas where the cockroaches are the size of small dogs. Oh yeah, and they fly.

I abhor roaches. There is no other way to say it. I could fill this whole page up with a devotional on my hatred of roaches and it still would not come close the disgust and horror that fills me when I see one in or near my house.

So, several months ago I am showering before bed. I reach out to grab my towel and begin drying myself off when I think I feel something scratchy rub my arm. I am immediately filled with a sense of dread followed by the most rational thought that it must be a tag on the towel or something equally mundane. This thought process takes place over a matter of about half a second, because even my reasoning doesn’t lift the queasy feeling in my stomach.

I quickly hold the towel as far away from me as possible, and what do I see but a gigantic cockroach crawling around on my bath towel! As I am screaming bloody murder and jumping up and down like a mad woman, I fling the cursed insect across the bathroom (our bathroom is the size of a small elevator, so this is of little comfort). Immediately I start yelling for John at the top of my lungs. He is, after all, only lying in bed in the next room, but I need to make sure he understands the urgency of the situation.

I hear John jump out of bed all the while yelling at me, “What’s wrong? Are you hurt? What happened? Who’s there?” I hysterically scream something like, “ROACH! ROACH! IT WAS ON ME! KILL IT! QUICK!”

While I am trying to decide how to extricate my nude self from the bathroom while avoiding the roach and at the same time not letting it disappear because vengeance is clearly necessary, John mutters something about going to get a fly swatter.

A fly swatter! He would have to go all the way to the other side of the house for this instrument when clearly a sturdy shoe right out of his closet would be more appropriate. I probably shout something of this nature, though I’m much too horrified by the incident and the live cockroach in my bathroom to clearly remember anything else.

John grabs a shoe, obliterates the roach, and then informs me that screaming bloody murder as he is falling asleep is to be reserved for intruders wielding axes or guns. I disagree. Cockroaches, especially ones touching my person, are on par with intruders, weapons or no weapons.

Needless to say, for about four days I had heart palpitations and sweaty hands every time I entered the shower. Months later I still take my towel off the rack and shake it vigorously before getting it anywhere near my body.

In the past week, I have noticed at some point during my showers there ends up being one or two baby, teeny tiny, roaches hanging out in a corner or two of the shower stall. These I can handle promptly with a wad of toilet paper. However, I am disturbed that a whole nest of these creatures must be lurking in our shower walls or underneath the shower floor. Clearly the bait traps we set out after the unfortunate towel incident are not doing the job!

And, by the way, I have a love/hate relationship with the bait traps. In the past, they always seemed to make the roaches disappear, at least from my view. Eventually. The trouble is that while the baits are fresh, I have to deal with roaches being lured out of hiding to come visit the bait traps.

And I’m starting to think that, unless the roaches are wise to the fact that if I see them they will die thus they need to come out to eat the bait while I am either asleep or away, the roaches will never get back to their nest with the bait, because I cannot see a roach and allow it to continue on its merry way. That’s just nonsense.

Maybe I will start placing a bait trap in the shower during the day when it is not in use. Then, hopefully, the roaches will not have to travel too far into the public eye to be poisoned.

Ugh. I hate roaches.

It’s a battle at our house.

And I won’t even get into the wasps that I suspect are living under the siding under the eaves on our back patio. Other than calling an exterminator, which I have been forbidden to do, I have no other ideas to resolve the problem. I am sure not tearing the siding down myself to be swarmed by wasps. But, that’s another post.