Here is some TMI, and why this resonated so EWWWWW with me . . . when my father died, I had to fly to Arizona, take care of some matters, fly back to Wisconsin and, several weeks later, return to Arizona to empty the house. I opened the toilet bowl cover, and there – just like the cockroach in ‘Men in Black 2′, was a family of cockroaches on the side of the bowl. It was at THAT MOMENT I decided to sell the house . . . never had seen or dealt with these things before and told myself I never would again . . .
So we moved to Florida where, luckily, they’re called palmetto bugs and I have no problem dealing with them (to be fair, we don’t have more than one or two a year, outside. Windex kills ’em quickly).
I went to grad school in San Antonio. The department chair was on sabbatical and three of my fellow students rented his house for the year. One night, at a party there, I noticed one of those round Weber charcoal grills. Apparently, students don’t do cookouts. I lifted the top off and cockroaches BOILED OUT AND OVER THE RIM IN A TSUNAMI WAVE. To this day it makes me shiver to think of it.
That would’ve been a scene in ‘Men in Black 1’. EWWWWWWWW.
@ Andréa – My college residence hall (in the L.A. suburbs) had a supply closet that was opened at least two or three times a day when college was in session (so the roaches kept out of sight). These cockroaches were the same size as palmetto bugs, they just didn’t have wings. During the summer months, it might go for a couple of weeks before anyone opened that door. One time when we had to go in there, there was such a massive infestation that one of the guys later got a baseball bat, and spent (as he put it) about an hour “squishing bugs”. I don’t know whether he kept score.
If there’s anything worse than a bug, to me, it’s a squished bug. Messier to clean, too. Did HE have to clean up his squishing mess???
I didn’t hear about it until a long time after the fact, so I don’t know who ended up doing the cleaning. However, the closet was under “house” control, so it’s unlikely that the custodial staff got stuck with the job (they didn’t have keys to it).
I did basic training in San Antonio. They have a thing they call a “water bug” that’s about 4 inches long and 2 inches wide and tall. The first introduction I got was when one fell off the ceiling to the floor with a big “whump”, and then after that it scuttled away.
The other interesting local wildlife was the huge numbers of bats. They’re mostly non-impactful, unless one gets inside. They’re super quiet when the fly, and they aren’t afraid of people so they swoop right down next to your head, and just suddenly appear in your peripheral vision. They’re mammals, so they can carry rabies virus.
Closer to home, I got up early one day at the beach to catch a low tide, because a favorite beach has a secluded cove that is only reachable at low tide… at high tide, the water comes in and covers up the sand and there’s a 100-foot-tall headland, basically a rocky cliff-face. This one time, the entire cliff was coated in bugs, from beach level up as high as I could see. It was first light, which on the west coast means the sun was behind the cliff. I got really close before I figured out what I was looking at. I didn’t go back to that beach for YEARS.
At least it wasn’t a RED TIDE!
A friend and I decided to rent a cheap apartment for a year of college. Every morning whoever got up first would flip on the kitchen light and they would scatter to hide. Of course meals consisted of mostly restaurants or groceries that could be cooked in their own container. After several requests throughout the year to the landlord to fumigate, he finally did so the week before our contract expired and he wanted to show the apartment to someone else. Argh.
One of my favorite two-line poems is by local sf writer Eleanor Arnason:
CLEAN HOUSE SONG
The roaches come out, on little roach feet,
And find there is nothing at all to eat.
Okay, my overly logical mind wants to know – did grandma put something into her “bowl” to mix and then take it from same and put it in her oven to bake?
Comics I Don't Understand 
Here is some TMI, and why this resonated so EWWWWW with me . . . when my father died, I had to fly to Arizona, take care of some matters, fly back to Wisconsin and, several weeks later, return to Arizona to empty the house. I opened the toilet bowl cover, and there – just like the cockroach in ‘Men in Black 2′, was a family of cockroaches on the side of the bowl. It was at THAT MOMENT I decided to sell the house . . . never had seen or dealt with these things before and told myself I never would again . . .
So we moved to Florida where, luckily, they’re called palmetto bugs and I have no problem dealing with them (to be fair, we don’t have more than one or two a year, outside. Windex kills ’em quickly).
I went to grad school in San Antonio. The department chair was on sabbatical and three of my fellow students rented his house for the year. One night, at a party there, I noticed one of those round Weber charcoal grills. Apparently, students don’t do cookouts. I lifted the top off and cockroaches BOILED OUT AND OVER THE RIM IN A TSUNAMI WAVE. To this day it makes me shiver to think of it.
That would’ve been a scene in ‘Men in Black 1’. EWWWWWWWW.
@ Andréa – My college residence hall (in the L.A. suburbs) had a supply closet that was opened at least two or three times a day when college was in session (so the roaches kept out of sight). These cockroaches were the same size as palmetto bugs, they just didn’t have wings. During the summer months, it might go for a couple of weeks before anyone opened that door. One time when we had to go in there, there was such a massive infestation that one of the guys later got a baseball bat, and spent (as he put it) about an hour “squishing bugs”. I don’t know whether he kept score.
If there’s anything worse than a bug, to me, it’s a squished bug. Messier to clean, too. Did HE have to clean up his squishing mess???
I didn’t hear about it until a long time after the fact, so I don’t know who ended up doing the cleaning. However, the closet was under “house” control, so it’s unlikely that the custodial staff got stuck with the job (they didn’t have keys to it).
I did basic training in San Antonio. They have a thing they call a “water bug” that’s about 4 inches long and 2 inches wide and tall. The first introduction I got was when one fell off the ceiling to the floor with a big “whump”, and then after that it scuttled away.
The other interesting local wildlife was the huge numbers of bats. They’re mostly non-impactful, unless one gets inside. They’re super quiet when the fly, and they aren’t afraid of people so they swoop right down next to your head, and just suddenly appear in your peripheral vision. They’re mammals, so they can carry rabies virus.
Closer to home, I got up early one day at the beach to catch a low tide, because a favorite beach has a secluded cove that is only reachable at low tide… at high tide, the water comes in and covers up the sand and there’s a 100-foot-tall headland, basically a rocky cliff-face. This one time, the entire cliff was coated in bugs, from beach level up as high as I could see. It was first light, which on the west coast means the sun was behind the cliff. I got really close before I figured out what I was looking at. I didn’t go back to that beach for YEARS.
At least it wasn’t a RED TIDE!
A friend and I decided to rent a cheap apartment for a year of college. Every morning whoever got up first would flip on the kitchen light and they would scatter to hide. Of course meals consisted of mostly restaurants or groceries that could be cooked in their own container. After several requests throughout the year to the landlord to fumigate, he finally did so the week before our contract expired and he wanted to show the apartment to someone else. Argh.
One of my favorite two-line poems is by local sf writer Eleanor Arnason:
CLEAN HOUSE SONG
The roaches come out, on little roach feet,
And find there is nothing at all to eat.
Okay, my overly logical mind wants to know – did grandma put something into her “bowl” to mix and then take it from same and put it in her oven to bake?
I think she started with what was there.