Dad is telling me roach stories in my previous post.

Had to stop three times to let the ROACHES cross the road. Like you do for deer in other parts of civilization. [near Houston]

I haven’t seen any THAT big. :p But let me tell you about me and the roaches. It’s possible that I had never seen a roach before I moved here. If I had, it didn’t really make a big impression on me. A few weeks ago, the apartment managers put a flyer on everyone’s door saying the exterminators were coming, and had we seen any roaches. At that point, I really hadn’t. So I said so and didn’t really think about it anymore, assuming that everyone who had talked about there being a lot of roaches in Texas was just making it up. (I’m delusional about things like this, seriously…doesn’t matter how often people tell me about bad stuff, I refuse to believe it’s possible, or that it’ll happen to me. I guess everyone’s like that to some degree.) Anyway.

The DAY AFTER the exterminators were here, I see this little black thing in the corner by the door. So I go and inspect it, and I seriously, seriously thought it was a cricket. Which, okay, noisy…but not bad. I helped it out the door. I swear! Then a day or two later, these things were everywhere. (That’s an exaggeration. I still have not seen more than one or two at a time. They come in waves, like a trained army.) And it dawned on me, that wait. I wonder if these are the infamous roaches. But they can’t be! Because these things jump and fly, and roaches don’t jump and fly, do they? DO THEY?! So I had to look them up on the internet to discover that yes, roaches jump and fly, and yes, these are roaches. I felt so dumb, having to look up roaches on the internet.

I figure the exterminators chased them out of everyone else’s apartment, and they came to mine, since I hadn’t had any yet. I spent one night going around and stomping on them, but I got tired of that quickly, especially since they’re kinda tough and jump really fast. So now I have Black Flag to spray them with (it’s kind of fun, actually….they try to jump away, and then they just go limp and flip over on their back–pretty powerful stuff), and some poison thingies. I think I need to get new poison thingies, though. After I put those out I didn’t see any more critters for a couple of weeks, but now they’re starting to resurface. They haven’t been truly bothersome…just annoyances. Well, except the one that jumped on me last night. First time that’s happened. *shudder*