Queen Cricket WILL Have Her Revenge (on my sorry ass)

Can I just say something?

I would love nothing more than to send this subject matter to the (me) and the bee vaults forevermore. I do not want to write yet ANOTHER post on our hellish insect problem but, based on the events of Sunday evening, it’s unavoidable.

Mind you, since the last time I wrote of our cricket woes and this past Sunday night, we were living what one might consider “insect free”. It was glorious, albeit short-lived. I am not one to tempt the fates so I kept my big trap shut about us being mostly rid of our infestation. The first batch of glue traps we bought were overflowing with the bodies of ill-fated hoppers and we finally had the decency to dispose of them Sunday afternoon before setting up new carcass-free traps to catch and collect any tiny stragglers.

Now…

Do you remember my saying how the crickets we had been catching were just baby-sized? Like, not even the full-grown HORROR-movie-sized proportion the adults can develop into? Do you ALSO remember me saying that as punishment for our killing all the baby crickets the cricket parents would likely be hiding inside shoes and in my underwear drawer poised to spring out and attack us for our thoughtless infanticide?

Well, I almost had to eat my words there. Thankfully, I never found a cricket in my shoes or drawers. I did, however, find a cricket in a place eleventy-thousand times worse than I could have ever imagined…

In bed.

ON my pillow.

Shall I set the scene?

We have a tiny house and because it’s so tiny we do the best we can to maximize on space. So in lieu of a more traditional sleeper, we have a loft bed which is basically like a bunk bed except instead of having a bed below the top bunk we have a desk/storage unit.

Capice?

Cool.

Although our crickets are extreme hoppers (I really cannot emphasize this enough) I typically feel safe in the bed because it’s about 5+ feet off the ground and in my mind a source of sanctuary in our insect filled home.

Boy, was I WRONG about that.

After a great weekend filled with movie-watching and photo shoots, we decide to retire to the bedroom in preparation for the new work week. In my groggy daze I climbed the ladder to our bed with the light in the room switched off because I wanted to make my transition from laying on the couch to laying on the bed as seamless as possible. The only problem with that plan was my being a violent sleeper by nature and as I’ve mentioned in the past, I don’t make the bed regularly so the blankets were all balled up at the bottom of the bed and I couldn’t make heads or tails of them in the darkness. This was when the bee suggested he turn on the light so I might see what I was doing and thank fucking GOD he did, because this is what happened next:

 

I just barely made it to safety from psycho-ninja cricket. To say I was traumatized by the event is putting it mildly. I had the bee re-check my hair for cricket multiple times because I wasn’t entirely convinced that crazy bitch wasn’t clinging to me somewhere in the hopes she could do her darndest to me mid-slumber.

Lucky for us, we have a pull-out bed that we slept on that night because there wasn’t a chance in HEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL I was going back into bed with that knife wielding maniac after me.

PS?

We never did find her so we’re still sleeping on the pull-out.

Probably forever.

Pray for us…

***

To read this mess from the beginning, click here.

The Saga Continues… *UPDATED*

You may have read what I wrote the other day about our war against the leggy leap-happy freaks in our home.

It was intended to be funny but the fact of the matter is that this situation is anything but.

Each morning I awake prepped and readied for battle:

Since writing of my insect woes not a day has passed without encountering a multitude of these vile bastards. Just this morning I had a rather large hopper leap towards me while I was in the bathroom. The one good thing about this interaction was I learned that cave crickets are highly irritated by the sound of shrill screams.

After shouting:

“EEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEeeeeeeeee! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-fucker-NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

and jumping up and down in front of it, it quickly changed its course of direction, retreating to creeper sanctuary a.k.a. the nearest darkened corner of the room.

Either I’m going to become the most fearless and brave bug warrior there ever was or I will succumb to their infestation long before the summer begins.

I’m leaning towards the latter being the more realistic scenario.

Please know, if you are reading this, that I love you and you are all invited to my funeral.

For those of you concerned about scheduling conflicts, I predict it will occur sometime around mid-June.

If I’m lucky.

I had some ideas for today’s post but this week’s events have sort of caused me to lose some focus. Also, I’ve been working on pieces for other sites, hopefully ones that will actually get picked up/generate some cash-ola.

If not? (me) and the bee readers will be subjected to all my reject material!

How awesome for you!!!

In the spirit of giving, I’ve decided to use today’s post to pimp-out some hardworking bloggers and their sites which I just ADORE:

Alex & Mina are so frikkin’ cute and (me) and the bee are super jealous of all their awesome adventures.

Oh, and they take a ton of pictures. AMAZING pictures.

Schmutzie was my first ever blog friend and I will always love her for that. She is also ridiculously talented and generous and hosts FiveStarFriday for other bloggers to submit the superb works of their peers. Check it out, yo.

OH.EM.GEE.

David Thorne is probably the most wickedly funny guy of ever. You will be thanking me later for this, no doubt.

Allie just might have the all-around funniest site on the interwebz. I am totally addicted to her. Visit once and you’ll be too.

Becky makes my sides split with her flashback photos and penchant for intentional misspellings. Obviously we are cut from the same cloth.

MamaPop hosts some of the wittiest and thought provoking pop culture related content on Innernet. They also have a dream-team staff comprised of some of the best writers in blog-land.

Sarah P is a master of the stick figure drawing *tips hat* and loves poop-talk almost as much as I do. If that isn’t a recipe for greatness, I don’t know what is.

Mepsipax’s site is titled Adventures of Being a Dick. Kind of self-explanatory. And awesome.

The Unqualified Economist was one of my earliest blogging allies and a great source for humor and headlines.

Saving the best for last…

Ok, so I’m clearly biased HOW-ever, the bee is unquestionably talented and incredibly dedicated to his daily photo capture project.

Give him some love, won’t you?

***

In case you STILL didn’t believe me, I now have photographic evidence of the little fuckers running all sorts of  ‘a-muck’ in our home:

Do you see this crap?

IS. NOT. FUNNY.

We set these traps yesterday afternoon and this is just what was collected OVERNIGHT.

Also?

What you see in that trap are just BABIES. Teeny-tiny stupid little baby hoppers who didn’t know any better and were baited into their sweet-sweet death by sugary poison. The adult hoppers obviously know better and are currently lying in wait inside my shoes and in my underwear drawer planning their revenge for our killing their offspring.

We are amidst an invasion of epic proportions.

Also, also?

That was just one of the traps we set.

You should have seen the one by the fireplace…

E-fuckin’-GAD!

***

For the final part to the story, click here.

Welcome to HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!

(me) and the bee are in the middle of a turf war.

It’s not me vs. bee. 

Rather, it’s US vs. THEM.

The other day I smacked Twitter’s ass with this message:

That day I didn’t go anywhere near the kitchen until the bee came home from work because I was terrified that the wily little hopper was going to spring from the sink basin and cling to some part of my body which I’m pretty sure would have caused immediate death by creepy.

Since then there have been 4 other incidents of cave crickets impeding upon our living space.

I am, admittedly, an over-dramatizer of events. HOW-ever, cave crickets are no laughing matter and this post contains no feigned alarmism.

You might be thinking: it’s “mind over matter” or they are more scared of you than you are of them.

Well, I think that’s bullshit because when I see one of those fuckers my mind says:

OH SHIT!!!! It’s a fucking bug! It’s got a quadrillion LEGS and probably a brazillion eyes and it’s coming for my life and it could totally fit up my nose or into my ear or HOLY FUCK NUTS, it could crawl in my MOUUUUUUUUUUUUTH!!!

help! panic! all-functionality-shut-ting-doooowwwwwn…

Even though I am fully aware that the size ratio between a human and an insect is highly disproportionate, this matters very little because it is ONLY the size issue that could even begin to make those fuckers un-scary.If humans and bugs were the same size, regardless of our increased level of intelligence, I theorize that the human race would cease to exist based on the sheer number of spontaneous heart attacks that would occur when each human first encountered a bug the same size as themselves.  

I should probably illustrate the extreme horror that is a cave cricket. You see, cave crickets look like giant freaky spiders, only like a million times creepier because they have these super long antennae that shoot out like 3 inches from their heads so it’s like they have 10 legs instead of the standard 8 for spiders and GET THIS… they are crickets, right? Well, these assholes JUMP like you wouldn’t believe and they move FAST.

Just the other day I was cleaning out the fireplace and in the blink of an eye one was RIGHT NEXT TO MY FOOT. Of course I immediately lept backwards while screaming bloody murder and in that time, quick as a flash, it was gone.

I avoided that side of the house until the bee got home.

And if you STILL think I’m being irrational, just look at an actual life-sized picture of these hell-spawns.

It’s not even summer yet. Most of these things are still hibernating or whatever they do in preparation for the warm weather cricket-pocalypse. I don’t know if we’re gonna make it.

Please send help. and Raid.

LOTS of Raid.

***

For part 2 of the saga, click here.

Brokedown Carcass

I’m pretty sure a bug crawled in my ear and died. You wanna hear what’s even worse than that? It happened in October

wait for it…

of 2008.

personally, i think the sunglasses are a *bit* much

I even went to the doctor not long after I started having weird issues which included a rushing sound and then a *POP* when I would bend over. Also, when I would shake my head “no” I would get this rattling noise inside my head. The Bee suggested that I become more positive.

I didn’t think that was funny.

The doctor clearly thought I was nuts at my assumption that an insect had crawled inside of my ear and died. I know this because he told me so. Actually, I believe he used the word  “nut-job“. I told him he might be singing a different tune if he’d seen Brokedown Palace, because Kate Beckinsale’s character had a cockroach crawl in her ear and die while she was sleeping and it made her all crazy and I’m pretty sure that was happening to me and frankly, that would explain A LOT.

I always had ear problems as a kid. I would get swimmer’s ear from taking too long a shower and I couldn’t go into any body of water without using those god-awful silicone earplugs for fear my ear holes would drown in liquid pollutants. Those earplugs also did wonders for my social life. Not only did they look fabulous but I was always the center of attention since I was constantly repeating “WHAT?” and “HUH?” at high volumes until people realized that they’d need to stand an inch from my face for me to understand what they were saying.

And that tactic is what I like to call “How to Successfully Reel in Friends”

OR

“How to Successfully Alienate Yourself From Others and Become Publicly Mocked by Your Peers”.

It’s really a matter of how you wanna look at it.

Anyway, my left ear is all sorts of effed. Between the bug that crawled in there and DIED, which, now that I’m thinking about it, could be seen as a good thing since other pontential residents would likely see the dead guy in there and head for someone else’s ear hole. Because bug or no, who wants to set up shop in a place so filled with death? Oh, wait. This guy.

On top of that, I had a particularly nasty bout of tonsillitis, which I’m pretty sure I never fully recovered from, just months prior to the insect suicide, so now the left side of my body from the neck up is basically in need of replacement.

So here’s what I need:

• left ear (refurbished) w/ all parts included
• left throat section, including tonsil (non-smoker preferred)

And here’s what I can give in return:

• left ear with bug carcass inside (in otherwise very good condition)
• left throat section, mostly damaged (for donation to “science”)
• my sincerest thanks

Also, if anyone has green eyes and freckles that they are looking to get rid of, I am definitely interested.