OUR NEW, UNWANTED PETS

I'm jumpng ahead a bit in my blog, but I wanted to let you all know of the latest news here in CR. Let me introduce you to our newest house-mate, cucaracha. That’s right, we have cockroaches in our apartment.

The day we moved in, we saw that there was a dead one in the laundry room. It didn’t really bother us because we knew that cockroaches as big as your thumb were as common here as daddy long legs are in Pennsylvania. The one in the laundry room was the only one we saw in our apartment until we stumbled across one laying belly-up in our living room on Tuesday evening. We thought it was dead at first, but we took a closer look and saw that its antennae were still twitching a little. Instead of squishing its guts all over the ceramic tile, we decided to let it die naturally since it was more than half way there. The next morning, we woke up and went to the living room/dining room to eat breakfast and saw it was GONE! Ants carried it away? It was just taking a snooze on its back? It died and was given a second chance at life? Whatever it was, we weren’t too thrilled about it.

Later that day at school, we were talking to some of the other teachers about our run-in with the roach. Danielle said that when she would see one, she found that spraying it with cleaner kills the thing pretty quickly and there aren’t any guts to clean up.

Thursday night, I was getting ready to jump in the shower while Brett was finishing up dinner. I turned on the water to let it heat up for a minute and the second I pulled back the curtain to jump in, I saw it by the drain. The cockroach was lying on its back, clearly alive and trying to get out of the water. Its hairy legs and forever long antennae were moving in every direction. Brett came to the rescue with some 409 spray and just as Danielle said, it was dead with no gut mess. He scooped it up with a piece of paper and threw it outside.

After dinner, we started searching the internet for DIY cockroach traps. Our search suggested that these gems hide in small crevices and areas such as cracks in the wall, coffee machines, microwaves, cabinets, and drains. Brett, who hates bugs in the house anyways, was automatically convinced there was one living in the coffee machine that he uses every day. I went over, pulled out the tray where he puts the coffee filter and found nothing. “Check where you put the water!” I put my hand on the lid and flipped it open so fast, just to find an empty space. No cockroaches in the coffee machine.

Every once in a while, we will hear a loud chirping noise coming from the bathroom/laundry room area and are wondering if cockroaches make noise? We searched that as well and Google told us that some do. This led to a search of our apartment with a flashlight. I checked under the couch, under the cabinets, under the stove…I found 5 dead ones. How long have they been there? Who knows. They could have been under there since before we moved in. Regardless, they are around.

That night as we were trying to sleep, we heard the chirping again. We felt things tickling our skin under the sheets. At one point when we were almost asleep, I could have sworn there was something crawling up my arm. I shot up out of bed and Brett had to convince me that everything was okay. It was really hard for us to fall asleep that night.

We were able to go right to sleep without any nightmares last night, but we are still on gaurd. I just hope we don't fid any baby cockroaches running around.

Oh yeah, if you weren't creepy-crawled-out enought, we also found this in our bathroom this week. Brett killed it, too.