Remember we bought a new house and moved to another city? Well, technically the house is only "new" in the sense that it is "new to us." In every other aspect this home is 45+ years old. Uh huh, go ahead and let all those stereotypes filter on through, because they're probably pretty accurate.

So the house had been unoccupied for over a year. Apparently other people enjoyed having such a nice, empty backyard in which to hang. I can only surmise this from the silent testimony of broken beer bottles and ground out cigarette butts (can I say butts on a family-friendly blog?), er, cigarette hineys that littered our backyard. But there were also non-people thingies that enjoyed the uninhabited state of our home/yard. Thingies like mice and roaches (Rob says I'm only fooling myself to call them Palmetto bugs). And since our "new" house was built by "old" standards, we can't seem to find a pest control company that will service our 16" crawl space (now it has to be 18").

Anyway.

We found a company to come service the exterior of our home and the whole of our yard. I'm not really into the whole spray-bug-poison-inside-my-house treatment. The gentleman explained we should see a dramatic decrease within two weeks (not sooner, since I wouldn't let him spray inside). Fine. We've dealt with it for a month, so what's two more weeks, right?

That was a week ago Monday. On that same night, at precisely 9:00 PM, all cockroach h*ll broke loose in our home. These things were literally crawling out of the woodwork in a staggering, poisoned-to-death sort of way. It never occured to me that they would try to come inside the house to escape the chemicals outside. What followed can only be described as a comedy of errors as all six of us scurried around with a flip-flop on each hand, or a flyswatter- sometimes both. Basically Rob and I were on stun/kill duty, and Harrison and Eli were on the pick-it-up-with-toilet-paper-and-flush-down-the-toilet patrol. Sophia and Kirk just ran around screaming, "Here's another one!" When the count got to 35, Eli started declaring, "That's it! We're going to the Ramanda (Ramada)." I told him, "Don't be ridicul- HOLY SMOKES! Is that one FLYING?!?! Get your clothes together, we're going to the Ramada!!"

As it turned out, the death toll only rose to 48. Yeah, I know. We didn't go to the Ramanda, or anywhere else, but sleep was a looooong time coming that night. I think in (many) years to come this will be hilarious. For now, I'm just thankful it wasn't the mice (however many there are) that came pouring into the house. Although, I have noticed a rather unsavory odor when I step out the front door...

Labels: home ownership