My intention was to post about blogging today, the direction I started in, where I’d like to be going with this, and of course, how very thrilled and excited I still am that one of my posts was chosen for yesterday’s Freshly Pressed.

Instead, I’m off on a traditional New York rant, much the way Man Child is on a quest to hunt down, trap, and kill the cockroach he saw in our kitchen cabinet a couple of hours ago.

I know, roaches are a fact of life in NY.  I think they’re pretty much a fact of life in every city; the more humid the city gets, the more densely populated, the more roaches there are.  That doesn’t make them welcome, or even tolerated, guests in MY apartment. I’ve been pretty lucky over the past 12 years or so, very few have found their way into my kitchen.  We won’t discuss the building’s basement, or the way I can hear their little legs scritch scittering across the sidewalk when I’m walking the dogs at night.

Three or four days ago I spotted a big one in the kitchen.  You know, the really big ones people like to call water bugs, because it makes us uncomfortable to acknowledge these critters can grow to be so large.  I promptly ran to the local drugstore, bought three boxes of Combat baits for my shoe box sized apartment, and planted them throughout the kitchen cabinets, against the walls, in the bathroom, some for good measure in the bedrooms and entranceway.  Like a welcome mat, only it says get the fuck out.

This morning, to my horror, we saw another one.  I know what infested means, and I know this isn’t it.  I’ve been in apartments where the roaches are doing the hustle across the kitchen floor in broad daylight, the backstroke in the puddle left by a leaky bathtub faucet, and have an ongoing performance piece happening on the wall of a bedroom. That’s infested.  This is me having a hissy fit.

A fit that sent me back to the drugstore for yet another box of Combat, a tube of gel incase any of the suckers are claustrophobic and don’t want to enter the trap to eat the bait, and got to work with Man Child and Nerd Child.  Everything is out of the cabinets, 2/3 have been cleaned with bleach and water, and half the cabinets have new traps laid with gel applied in strategic cracks and gaps.

Wonderful. Only now I’m so nauseous from breathing in bleach and poison fumes, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to get up to finish the job.  Man Child took a break and went to the store, so he’s beat, too.

Frankly, I don’t care how superior they are on the evolutionary scale, I hate roaches. Sick or not, it’s time for me to get back to my mission, and send any of these strays packing. Yuck!