The Cockroach Story

Okay, was going to write the story of what happened immediately following the fireplace incident, but then started thinking about the cockroach story instead. You're gonna love this.

When Miah and I first moved into our apartment, we were moving all of our stuff from her parents' house, where she had been living (and my stuff had been stored) all summer. Early that first day, we went to the apartment while it was still empty. Maraiah likes things neat and orderly (how we EVER lived in the same house, is beyond me!) and so she didn't fully trust the apartment complex to clean to her standards for the move-in. We went to run through it with the vacuum, and to set off some bug bombs. We returned about 2 hours later to open the windows and air the place out, then later that afternoon with the first load of boxes. We did a walk-through of the place, and a re-vacuuming to suck up any bug bodies that might be laying around. We tackled the living room together, then each headed off to inspect our own bedroom and bathroom. And that's when I heard a bloodcurdling shriek. I went running into her bedroom and looked into the bathroom, where she stood in the doorway (I heard the mission bell... oops, no, wrong story) pointing at something behind the toilet. I asked her what it was, and she gasped, "Cockroach!"

Now, if you've ever lived in an apartment in southeast Texas, you know that little bitty cockroaches are darn near impossible to keep out of the house completely, unless you happen to have no job, no life, no purpose IN life other than to stalk and kill tiny vermin. And knowing how she sometimes overreacted to un-neatness, I was sure she was talking about a little baby cockroach.

Until I came around to the other side of the toilet, where I saw a cockroach that was, to put it plainly, FRIGGIN' HUGE!!!! The kind that are roughly the size of what we called potato bugs, back home in NorCal. (Side note: My sister, mother and I are so afraid of potato bugs that once, when we saw one on my mom's bedroom floor, we all jumped up on the bed, and stayed that way for a good ten minutes, before my sister bravely LEAPT the five feet from the bed to the door, and ran across the street to get the neighbor boy to come catch and kill it.) Anyway, back to the bathroom in Texas, with the ginormous, albeit very very DEAD, cockroach. Miah and I had the kind of reasonable, cool-headed debate one would expect in such a situation.

"You get it."
"No, you get it!"
"You said you could handle it."
"It's your bathroom."

And back and forth, until I was finally just a little bit ashamed of my fear of a dead bug. (Even though it was a GIANT dead bug.) And so, I devised a plan. Ran to the kitchen, fetched the broom and dustpan. Stuck the dustpan on the end of the broom to make a sort of shovel-like apparatus. Discovered that the broom handle was too narrow, or perhaps the dustpan handle too wide, for that to work - the dustpan kept slipping to the side whenever we scooped the cockroach into it. But then, we're resourceful women.

Duct tape.

Taped the dustpan to the broom handle. Miah stood with her back pressed firmly to the wall, holding the toilet lid up. I screwed up every last bit of courage I had, and scooped the cockroach into the dustpan, then quickly flipped it into the toilet. Miah dropped the toilet lid, sat on it (so the little bugger couldn't suddenly pop up out of it - we've both seen horror movies, and besides, those little suckers sometimes PLAY dead to trick you), and flushed.

Then we flushed again, just to be sure.

And the third time was the charm.

Thus OFFICIALLY began our adventures (though the beginnings of the apartment search 4 months prior gave us a pretty good clue as to how it would go)...

More adventures to come, later on, including the trip to the bus station, Mike and the Chinese food, the hunt for an apartment, Railroad the Cat, and the World's Best Excuse.