Bug Me Not

A few years ago, my sister lived in an apartment that was attractive to large, flying roaches. In her opinion, which I share, it was actually attractive to just one large, flying roach. She was too creeped out to touch the thing, and her then-boyfriend (now, husband) doesn't kill bugs. He humanely releases them into the wild, where they're free to return to the nice warm apartment with the easy food.

Lilsis has written humorously in the past about her partner's experiences with "helping" spiders, but this story needs to be told in his own words.

So, today, without permission, I'm totally plagiarizing an email my sister's new husband wrote to his family a couple of years ago, after the first roach sighting. Here's hoping it doesn't bring a plague of roaches (or spiders) upon my house.

Lilsis does not like roaches. More specifically, roaches in her house; it's the "in the house part" that is the key. Anyway, while I was out errand-ing yesterday she called and had been "surprised" by a visiting member of the roach family. She quickly hurled a book at it, but it eluded her death strike and went missing for the remainder of the day.

When I got to her place after work, we resumed cleaning her room (which is what she had been working on earlier in the day). I was assigned to the "dangerous area"- under the bed--and Lilsis was folding clothes on the opposite side of her bedroom. Well, we cleaned for a while, made some headway, and no roach was to be seen. That is, until I saw that it was sitting on her back. Now, my view was that the roach was trying to apologize for his intrusion in her abode by giving her a warm embrace . . . Lilsis felt differently about the matter.

As soon as I saw it, I calmly rolled up whatever piece of paper I had in my hand and slowly and stealthily walked over behind her. My first swing at the roach failed to knock it off, but it did alert Lilsis, and she immediately knew what was happening. At that moment Lilsis immediately sprang into a convulsion of screams, jumping and swatting, while either I, with my second swing, or she with her hand—there's still debate—knocked the roach off of her. She had rocketed to her bed where she continued to get the heebie-jeebies and scream, and Orion (the enormous dog) not knowing what to do with himself, ran laps over the bed and on the floor until he realized that our major concern at the moment was not with him being on the bed and so he sat on my pillow and cleaned himself.

The roach being either stunned or crafty sat on the floor motionless—undoubtedly trying to camouflage its brown self on the orange carpet: not a very effective tactical decision. I found a glass and a piece of paper and contained the intruder. He was freed outside and the apartment is, for now, roach-free. All in a day's work.

Good job, Lilsis. Laughter is important in a marriage.