As some of you may know, in general, I harbor no ill will to cockroaches. When I first came to Bangladesh I would even let them live as long as they didn't run at me. Having your own place and meeting others' sensibilities has changed that for me. In my house I now kill on sight and yell out catchphrases like "BoOYeah!!!" or "How do you like me now!!!" every time. I've done a lot of cleaning in the last two days and that has led to killing of cockroaches. No case was as unique as me versus the cockroach horde.
It all started when I wanted to make a cake. I found a mixer in my cabinet that I hadn't been using up to this point and figured this would be a good time to see if it worked. When I picked it up it rattled a bunch and junk dropped out of it. I figured maybe a bunch of ants (very very common in my house) had made a nest in it at one time so I decided to open it up and clean it out. I got out my trusty screwdriver and dusted off my love for tearing things apart (this is legit, ask my parents). I got to work figuring out how my mixer was assembled and curious to see what was inside. It took about 5 minutes but I managed to peel the two halves of the mixer apart and inside was a bunch of gunk and a family of 5 cockroaches!!! One child scrambled out immediately which is what made me aware they were in there and I quickly grabbed a shoe to vanquish it. I thought it might have been the only one but when I looked down inside I could seen antenna poking out from under the motor. Over the next 20 minutes I tried various methods to get the cockroaches out from under that motor. I shook the thing, I poked the screwdriver down in after them, and I tried grabbing their exposed antennas with a clothes pin. Over time I was able to coax 3 out of 5 of them out. Of those 3 I single-handedly defeated 2 of them. The third one was taken out by a lizard living behind a piece of furniture in my house who chomped down on the thing before I could even react. He then proceeded to swallow the thing whole while I watched. It gave me a whole new love for those lizards! The 4th cockroach fell to my jabbing screwdriver. As I impaled him and pulled him out I was reminded of a time I had a raccoon up against a wall with a pitchfork. The raccoon escaped my grasp, the cockroach was not so lucky. The 5th cockroach was older and wiser than the rest. This was the boss cockroach!
All of my afore mentioned efforts to slay this beast failed miserably. He was safely tucked in under the motor and seemed to know I couldn't get to him there because of the tightness of the space. After about 5 minutes of toying with him, I finally decided I needed to pull the motor out. I giggled as I unscrewed the attachments and told him (literally) that this was going to be the most amazing/last thing he ever saw. I was right on both accounts. when I pulled the motor out he was so stunned that he just sat there. I flipped him with the screw driver over onto the floor which woke him from his stupor but it wasn't fast enough for him to escape the wrath of my size 9 shoes. The official final score of Phil vs. the Cockroach Horde! was:
Cockroaches 0
Lizard 1
Phil 4 (plus a clean working mixer!)
2 comments:
I'll back Phil's claim about having a love for tearing things apart. I'm just happy to see that he has now learned how to put things back together so they work again!
I love your dad's comment. So glad not to have those kinds of critters running in my house... eeks! I've had a hard time this week with the ants I found living in the bottom of my coffeepot.. Mark had an even harder time w/the situation when he heard about it. First time for that one for us. Now I'm grateful it was ants and not cockroaches!
Post a Comment