camwyn | Killed me my first roach yesterday.

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.