Thursday, July 25, 2019

And with the rain came....


Camel Crickets.  They’re called camel crickets because their legs are as long as a camel's.  And they look like something just off the boat from Jurassic Park.  Long story short, my daughter was having two girlfriends stay over our house for the weekend.  I go down into the basement where they'll be staying and decide it might be good to clean up a bit.  I go to move a large piece of cardboard.  Out of the corner of my eye is something on the edge of the cardboard that's so large that mentally it doesn’t register as being a bug.  I actually touched it and it jumped (one might say flew...the Incredible Hulk cannot fly but he's so powerful that when he jumps it seems like he's flying.  It was like that.)  Major “Oh Crap” and I go looking for the creature.  I turn a lot of things upside down but can't find it.  I make a management type decision and tell no one about my encounter with the twelve legged atomic mutation.  My thought process was that if I tell anyone what I saw and that I didn’t catch it, that I'd be paying for a lot of hotel rooms over the weekend.  Besides, I probably scared him back to wherever he came from.  And I figured if I heard screaming at 3 AM, I'd have a pretty good idea what it was about.  I didn't have to wait that long.  My daughter searches me out and tells me there is a large bug on the bathroom mat downstairs.  Note: The back legs of the camel cricket have monstrous spines sticking out.  They were stuck on the bathroom rug.  I get the phone book and solve my problem.  I’m very relieved…for about an hour.  Someone’s about to go into the shower and the deceased bug's big brother is attached to the shower curtain.  I get a tennis racket and beating the daylights out of the curtain.  It finally falls to the ground, but he's not dead.  I've knocked off one of his legs and I'm thinking about the "fight or flight" instinct in animals.  This prehistoric bug has probably figured out that he can't run away with one leg and I immediately think he's going to turn and come after me.  A couple more forehands and this guy’s done too.  I’ve never played so well.  I feel confident that I now have the situation under control.  Three minutes later I get the call again.  They say it's on the ceiling of the bathroom.  I go down, and inverted, clung to the ceiling of the bathroom is a wolverine.  When I saw it, I stopped dead in my tracks and immediately thought of two catch phrases.  First from the movie Jaws..."We're going to need a bigger Frying Pan."  I'm thinking I don't have a frying pan in the house that’s large enough to kill that thing.  And then from Hillary Clinton, "It's going to take a village of frying pans".  What's worse is the girls are standing right behind me – no way out.  There’s no time to think, I need to go into that small bathroom and close the door behind me.  If “It” gets out, I’ll need to sell the house.  I’ve got three old Sports Illustrated magazines in hand, but I’m really wishing I had an automatic weapon. It’s now time to try to kill this gargantuan insect.  I close the door behind me and can almost see a smile on the heinous bug’s face.  I imagine he's thinking, "Now I've Got You!"
We do have a happy ending to the story.  The doctors say aside from the tetanus shot and a battery of rabies injections I should be just fine.