Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite

My usual breakfast is oatmeal (prepackaged strawberry or peach flavored, if I'm feeling lazy; regular oatmeal with blueberries added if I'm more ambitious) and toast.

This morning I took my usual two slices of bread and approached the toaster and then saw it. I gigantic tarantula hovering over the toaster.

OK. So it was only a mosquito with very long legs but it looked like a tarantula. I had to choose between my hatred of dealing with bugs and my desire for toast. Toast won, just barely. I got lots of tissues, wadded them up, and grabbed the mosquito, leaving behind a couple of legs attached to the wall, which I cleaned up after I'd sent the body to its final resting place through the toilet.

You can't toss bugs, even smashed bugs, in the garbage because they might, you know, regenerate and come back bigger and madder and you don't want to deal with an angry bug.

Just like you can't wash a spider down the sink and assume it is gone for good. You have to run the garbage disposal for a long time to make sure there are no leftover pieces of the thing.

I don't have the terror of spiders that my friend Lynn does. If Lynn discovers a spider in your bathroom, she will take lots of poison and spray and spray and spray until you don't want to let small children in your bathroom for a couple of years, and then clean your whole downstairs to make sure that there are no other spiders anywhere. I have often thought of planting a spider here and there just to get my house clean, but then I'd have to, you know, touch the damn things.

But I hate bugs. I don't know how many people actually know it, because my philosophy is to live and let live. I don't really want to let them live, but to kill them, I have to get close to them, so it's easier to give them a wide berth and just hide somewhere until they are gone.

Maybe it started in childhood. Imagine sending a child off to sleep with "don't let the bedbugs bite." No wonder I had night terrors throughout childhood!

This is cockroach season, when all the cockroaches are birthin' babies. We rarely see cockroaches around here, but if we do it will be in the downstairs bathroom at night. You could develop a bladder infection waiting for a lone cockroach sitting on the bath mat to leave. Fortunately, cockroaches don't like light, so they generally scurry off...god knows where (I don't want to think about it)...when I turn on the light. I no longer stagger to the bathroom in the dark. I always turn on the light to make sure I'm not going to step on a cockroach.

Walt is the knight in shining armor who buys roach motels and chases them out, so that after the first few weeks, we rarely see any any more.

Maybe my aversion to bugs started when I was babysitting for a couple in a cabin at Lake Tahoe. We had an invasion of "june bugs"

Only I don't remember them being this small. These guys, who literally battered the wooden door with their hard bodies, looked like they were extras from a 50s Japanese monster film. A few managed to get in and I remember doing battle with one, literally, with the poker from the fire place. I was like a woman crazed, smashing the poker down on his body over and over and over again, finally flipping his inert body into the roaring fire. Only then did I feel safe about going upstairs to go to sleep.

Damn, if I didn't wake up the next morning and the june bug was crawling out of the fireplace. Lemme tell you, folks, when they say that bugs will survive when all of us are gone, I'm here to attest that's definitely true!

I spent a night of horror in Hawaii, when we visited our friend Mike. I remember being curled up on the couch watching Char chase the cockroaches across the wall and then Walt and I went into the bedroom and the rug was literally carpeted with red ants. That whimpering sound you hear is me.

Ants (the little black ones, not the big red ones) I can sort of stand because we've had so many horrendous infestations of them I got used to them. I almost enjoy watching them, though I do crack at some point and go on a killing rampage. But they are fascinating to observe. Fortunately we haven't had a really serious attack in a long time.

And while I enjoy butterflies, don't even get me started on moths. Ever since I heard of Judy Garland talk about having a moth fly in her mouth during a singing of "Over the Rainbow" at the Hollywood Bowl.

I watched Matt Lauer on The Today Show this morning eating a fried cricket. They say that someday bugs will be a great protein source for humans, when we have managed to poison or kill our other food supplies. If that day comes during my lifetime, I will finally have the slim trim figure that I have coveted for so long, 'cause there ain't no way I'm eating any damn bugs.

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Cousins day is tomorrow...and you know what that means? The next entry for this journal will be late.