Houseguests good and bad
My older son is coming for a short visit. I'm so excited to see him again. I normally don't cook on Saturday, but today I'm making his favorite, Chicken Stuff (I use sour cream instead of mayo & lemon juice, and skip the cream of chicken soup, and serve it over rice). That way, I'll be sure he'll be home for at least 15 minutes at some time today. Maybe there's something good on HBO he'll want to watch tonight.
The other houseguests are not so pleasant. They're kind of gross. OK, they're really gross. Cockroaches. Since we thoroughly cleaned the kitchen and dining room a few months ago, and put poison and traps in the space between the laundry room floor and the garage floor, they are a lot fewer and further between. Yankees (like me) associate cockroaches with filth. Well, that's just not so, here in the deep South. If you have a mild winter, like last one, the suckers never get killed off. It takes a hard freeze to reduce the populations, I think, and we haven't had one of those since 2002-2003. So even the cleanest of houses will get occasional invaders.
DH is the designated cockroach destroyer. A couple of times, just hollering his name, he has thought one of us was severely injured. So, we've changed our call. When we see a cockroach, we just yell "Cockroach!" And then he comes and kills it.
That was an unpleasantly common event in the spring. By early summer, it had pretty much dwindled to once or twice a month. But I was reminded of it again when one went crawling across the dining room floor.
Do you suppose they are opening the pet door in the garage, and getting in that way?
The other houseguests are not so pleasant. They're kind of gross. OK, they're really gross. Cockroaches. Since we thoroughly cleaned the kitchen and dining room a few months ago, and put poison and traps in the space between the laundry room floor and the garage floor, they are a lot fewer and further between. Yankees (like me) associate cockroaches with filth. Well, that's just not so, here in the deep South. If you have a mild winter, like last one, the suckers never get killed off. It takes a hard freeze to reduce the populations, I think, and we haven't had one of those since 2002-2003. So even the cleanest of houses will get occasional invaders.
DH is the designated cockroach destroyer. A couple of times, just hollering his name, he has thought one of us was severely injured. So, we've changed our call. When we see a cockroach, we just yell "Cockroach!" And then he comes and kills it.
That was an unpleasantly common event in the spring. By early summer, it had pretty much dwindled to once or twice a month. But I was reminded of it again when one went crawling across the dining room floor.
Do you suppose they are opening the pet door in the garage, and getting in that way?
3 Comments:
I had to chuckle at the way you are trying to entice your son to hang around longer with food and something good on TV. I use those methods too, but the magnetic power of peers is stronger, yea stronger than a mushroom seed that moves mountains.
I had two brushes with cockroaches -- one in Texas where that sucker was so big it could have walked out of the house with the couch strapped to its exoskeleton. The other brush was back when we were newly married, living for the summer in the BYU men's housing off campus. It didn't matter how many times the housing office had those apartments sprayed, those cockroaches came back in droves. Chalk that up to the filthy housecleaning habits of young single men, because cockroaches in Utah are not the norm like in the south. We only last in that apartment about a month and a half before we found other digs. It took me a long time to get over the urge to get up in the middle of the night and stand ready with the vaccuum hose in the kitchen, suddenly flick on the lights and do the exterminator thing.
Oh, Oh! I have the Perfect Solution to the roach problem! Now keep in mind, I live in New Mexico where it's hotter than you-know-where and we seldom get any rain. But bear with me...
Years ago my son had this hobby of collecting snakes (I know!) And every so often one of those little suckers would get loose in the house. I noticed that we never saw a single roach after that. Not one! And since I don't particularly MIND snakes, it was definitely the lesser of two evils. Go find a garden snake or two and let them loose in the crawl space under the house. Your younger son will think it's cool. -Really!
Lori in NM
I worked at a big hospital near Houston once, cleanest place I had been at. Down in the basement, painted white unlike maintenance spaces in most buildings, were the largest cockroaches I ever ran across. Guess it doesn't matter how clean you are, if they want in they can get in.
My wife lived in Phoenix (not known for bugs) next door to a poorly cleaned house. Subject to periodic floods of roaches from next door she got a chicken. It ran around the yard, and ate anything that came under the fence, thereby keeping her place relatively free.
Maybe you can get some chickens? Then you could have fresh eggs.
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