azurelunatic | La Cucharacha

It's just shy of 9 in the morning, which is NOT wake-up time for sleepy Lunatics, as they work very late on weekdays. Nonetheless, biological imperative demanded that I rise. Striding sleepily back to bed, my mind half-registered what looked like a small hole in the ceiling, and only fully registered it once I was tucked back in bed again and attempting to sleep.

I squinted. It sure didn't look like it had been there the night before. I knew my ceiling reasonably well. I know I'm going to regret putting my glasses on, I thought as I walked over to the desk, retrieved them, and walked back. I was right.

I called the office. "There's a cockroach on my ceiling, and I don't like bugs," I informed the new manager, adding my name and apartment number as an afterthought.
"I'll see if I can send the maintenance guy down," she told me. "And keep your eye on it. We don't have time to look for it."

I semi-dressed under my nightgown as I kept a wary eye on the ceiling. I wondered how long it would take the maintenance guy to get there. I wondered if it would be worth my time to get my cellphone and make a panicked text message post to LJ about my little visitor.

He knocked. I indicated the ceiling -- a spot very near my bed.
"It's just la cucharacha," he told me.
"I don't like la cucharacha," I informed him.

He made a heroic NBA leap with a paper towel.
"You want it?" he asked.
"...NO."

He and the (presumably squished) remains of la cucharacha departed, after leaving me with the intelligence that the bug-sprayer guys would be in and around sometime later on.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Might I reccommend washing your kitchen surfaces with bleach water?

Aren't the chemical pesticides used to eradicate la cucaracha more hazardous to your health than la cucaracha itself? La cucaracha may attract house centipedes that like to eat them; food chains have a way of establishing themselves.

You don't sound like the kind of person who wants to host a food chain in their apartment.

I'm not fond of having nasty chemicals sprayed about, but I'm less fond of assorted creepy-crawly things. I think centipedes would be even less welcome than their prey.

In the old apartment, my roommates and I had cats, and they were very attentive to anything that looked even slightly like a bug. Since there was food chain action going on there, we made sure to not spray unless there were things that the cats wouldn't eat that we couldn't live with -- tiny ants and biting spiders were the things that we wound up having management spray for -- because we had no desire to have a poisoned bug become a cat treat.

And it really does depend on the food chain. I abhor cockroaches and centipedes. I don't mind small spiders who mind their own business. I adore spiders who not only mind their own business but also eat mosquitoes. I'm very glad that there aren't as many mosquitoes here as there were in Alaska.

I see good reasons for your dislike-

Fear of domestic cockroach pests is perhaps warranted because they have been associated with the development of childhood asthma and thus it is better not to have them in your home environment.

...the cockroach GI tract can harbor all the diseases that are being passed around in the house or neighborhood. They are omnivorous and thus would just as likely eat a dead mouse or a bit of fallen cheese or nibble on your house plant. They often defecate near or on the food they eat so they are likely to pass the organisms in their GI tract to the food they are eating and the surfaces they walk and defecate on.

Link to source page: the best, non-toxic way to kill cockroaches (http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/kunkel/cockroach_faq.html#Q8)

Yay to the cats! I love cats.

Thanks for the link! That's a lot of information on them.

I once made a drive of an hour each way to rescue a friend from a Big Scary Bug. (Okay, she treated me to dinner afterwards, but the *point* of the trip was the Rescue Mission. She'd been hiding out in her bedroom for the previous 24 hours, with occasional darting forays to the bathroom, while the Exoskeletal Terrorist set up its HQ in the living room.)

Exoskeletal Terrorist. *grin*

Thought you might like that! *weg*

La Cucharacha

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my chemical phobia asserts itself

Re: my chemical phobia asserts itself

pro et contra

Re: pro et contra

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no subject

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