Killed me my first roach yesterday.

[camwyn]

See, the apartment building I live in, while quite nice, brings in an exterminator every few months to spray all the apartments. I dunno if this is because lots of them have trouble, or if some specifically have trouble and the owner believes in prophylaxis, or because of city regulations on apartment buildings, or what. The exterminator came Saturday and sprayed in my kitchen and bathroom.

Saturday evening I go into the bathroom and there is a roach inspecting my bottle of liquid soap on the sink.

This does not make me disgusted, or afraid. This makes me angry- an incandescent, blue rage at this filthy creature that has dared to invade my home. It scrambles out of the way, though not with any kind of particularly roachlike speed, and by the time I get over to where I had seen it go, it's vanished from sight.

I spend the next half hour shaking with rage and putting down the Combat roach traps my sister gave me as part of a housewarming present. ("All apartments I've ever lived in have had roaches," she said at the time.) I try to get to sleep on Saturday night but take quite a while to get there because I am still in the grips of the blue rage and that does terrible things to the adrenaline level in the blood.

Sunday goes decently- I see nothing untoward in the morning, and in the afternoon I go to visit my parents and sister. I get to hold my baby nephew and feed him and talk to him and stuff like that. He will get his aran-style knitted onesie on his next visit because I have not yet got the buttons or the sleeves sewn on… anyway, I come home and all seems well, though I have to take the peanut butter out of the freezer where I put it when I was putting down the roach traps. I get up to use the bathroom somewhere around 8:30.

Roach in the bathroom. Just one. Same size as the roach from yesterday. It's on my shower curtain.

Next to the bottle of liquid soap from yesterday is the bottle from which I refill it… the third-largest size of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap. As in labels crawling with demented half-coherent quasi-religious, quasi-political text, including the words, "DILUTE! DILUTE! OKAY!"

I haven't diluted.

I grab the bottle, flip the lid open, and squirt it as hard as I can at the bug in the hopes of knocking it off the shower curtain and into the tub, where I can take further measures. It starts struggling as soon as the stream hits it, and then scrabbles furiously to stay on the curtain, but fails to do so. The bug slides down the curtain in a flood of pepperminty doom. And I do mean doom, because it hit the tub, landed on its back, kicked two or three times, and ceased to move at all.

Either that is one bloody powerful soap, or the roach was already poisoned and the soap was the last straw… but either way I don't think I'll be switching to bar soap any time soon.

friggin' roaches.

Comments

[innerbrat]

Just two roaches? You are lucky.

There last house I lives in was above a kebab shop. We found three roaches the day we moved in and over the next few months considered ourselves lucky for the times we spent not chasing off roaches, mice and rats thesize of small dogs.

*shudder*

[sookail.livejournal.com]

aaah...*childhood roach memories*
they are everywhere
they`ll survive the apocalypse
and any poison
and, possibly, us

just think of them as neighbours?

[camwyn]

Ants I can deal with. Roaches piss me off.

[batyatoon]

Actually, they might survive the apocalypse, but they won't survive its aftermath. Roaches originally evolved in tropical climates. A NY winter without heated buildings would kill them.

[terrie01.livejournal.com]

Thankfully, I never had roaches. I did, however, have the most massive fruit fly invasion I have ever seen. Came in on a persimmion and started to breed in the bathroom sink. It was.... Yuck. I had up fly tape and was pouring bleach down my drains and it still took, oh, a month or two to over come it.

[hangingfire.livejournal.com]

I live in Texas, where roaches are a fact of life. Particularly the great big waterbug things. For some strange reason, I'm the only one in the house who ever seems to see them, which is starting to make me question my sanity.

Anyway, Formula 409 also works on the little bastards, if soap's not handy. Both it and soap are easier to clean up than Raid roach spray, and stink less.

[zakkati.livejournal.com]

My sympathy, I loathe and detest roaches. The ones in Tunisia are the size of dinner-plates(or so they seem to me!).I have to sleep in my big knickers when I'm over there due to a horrible story I was told! *shudder*

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

1. Dr. Bronner's rocks. In fact, it not only rocks, but shines like a big shiny thing.

2. Roaches are a fact of life, When your building is sprayed, they move next door. When they spray next door, the roaches move back in with you. The quality of your housekeeping is irrelevant. Boric acid is a help. So is a gecko, although with a no-pets policy, this is probably not an option.

3. You are not alone (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/000325.html)

[camwyn]

Given that the landlady was okay with fish tanks, she might not necessarily get upset about a gecko if I keep it in its tank most of the time it's not on bug patrol. Hm.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

One drawback: if other people are poisoning their roaches, your peak predator will concentrate it.

Dr. Bronner's worked so well 'cause roaches breathe through tiiiiiiny little spiracles in their sides, and it, well, filled 'em with slippery detergent and it suffocated to death. Like a baby and a dry-cleaning bag, only pepperminty. My mom used to use the same stuff on her ficus when it got aphids (or whatever). Spritz it on from an old windex bottle (I think she diluted some) until the whole tree is lightly sudsy, let sit on back porch for six or seven hours, rinse with garden hose (to let the TREE breathe again; it can take half a day, but not days on end), return to house. No bugs, no toxins, whee!

Oh, and you probably know this, but ... don't step on roaches. If you must whack them with something, wipe off the whacker (and floor) fairly quickly, preferably with bleach AND a surfactant. Why? Because roaches are nonsocial insects. This means half of them are breeding females. And if you squash a pregnant female, the eggs get all over everything (tiiiiiiny eggs), and if you walk in those shoes, you're egging everything with roach eggs. Ick.

I come from a long line of landlords. :->

[batyatoon]

Roaches, especially big ones, are just about the only critter that triggers my AUGH KILL IT KILL IT reaction. Most bugs, at worst, just make me want to get them out of the immediate area.

[camwyn]

I have no problem with most bugs, and frankly, other than the possibility of scorpions when visiting Texas I generally leave arachnids where they are when I find them. (I don't live in an area where fiddlebacks or black widows are common.) Ants, small ones, are unwelcome but not particularly loathsome. Big black ants, like carpenter ants, are a Very Bad Sign and Must Be Destroyed. Roaches get the Dalek response.

Madagascar hissing roaches get the 'oh-kay, someone knocked over their tank of creepy pets, didn't they' response instead.

[camwyn]

Oh, yeah- are we still on for tonight?

[ymfaery]

A denizen from the land of the B-52 roach says: child-size rubber slipper on a stick. Wonderful way to kill roaches *and* let out your rage with nice, solid *thwacks*. I wish the person who used to sell these in the flea market would come back and sell more.

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

Soap is kinda like borax, only milder (although perhaps yours is not so mild). Disolve the wax off their hides, and they shrivel up inside *fast*. For once an insecticide that's *really* only harmful to insects (and other exoskeletal sorts).

[deep-shadow.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of my childhood home in Florida. We had a bush that spawned lizards that would frequently come into the house. It was awesome.

And are you sure you want to be putting stuff on your body that kills a bug that can survive nuclear fallout?

[camwyn]

Eh, the dose makes the poison. I bombarded the bug- which was probably already poisoned- with more than twice its own body mass in the stuff. I'll worry about Dr. Bronner's when I'm presented with a vat of it that's the size of the living room couch.

Christine Lavin - Great Big Bug

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

I'm not afraid of the water,
I'm not afraid to fly,
But when I see a great big bug
I know that one of us must die.

("And it's going to be the one with more than 2 legs!")

Re: Christine Lavin - Great Big Bug

[camwyn]

My favourite Michael Ironside line ever:

"YOU GET DOWN THERE AND YOU KILL ANYTHING THAT'S GOT MORE THAN TWO LEGS!!! YOU GET ME?"

I have no objection to most insects and am often called on by my family to remove insects physically from the house with as little damage done to the creatures as possible. Roaches and carpenter ants don't count.

[djadjamankh.livejournal.com]

"Listen Children, Eternal Father, Eternal One! Use only two cosmetics: enough sleep and Dr. Bronner's Soap!"

Brilliant. Wonderful. I shall go out and buy a new bottle posthaste. Yet another use for the stuff, along with the hundred thousand or so listed on the bottle. You ought to write them.

[camwyn]

I probably will, when I get the chance. God, that was lovely stuff.