Household war results in carnage
They mostly came out at night.
I think it was usually recreational but it might have had something to do with food.
The first time I noticed them was a short time after the plumbers had initially turned the drywall in our home into Swiss cheese in order to temporarily fix a problem that would eventually mean a complete re-plumb in our home. I turned the light on in the kitchen one night to get a drink of water and interrupted their baseball game. As many cockroaches as were assembled on the kitchen floor they had to be playing ball.
I grabbed a can of fly spray and began doing battle with the nasty little creatures right then but most escaped unscathed beneath the centerfield fence. The next day I escalated the hostilities by purchasing bug spray that actually had a picture of the offending insect.
Perimeter spraying of the household netted a pretty fair body count and collaterally even wasted a few arachnids. But the athletic events continued after the lights went out.
The bug spray must have contained steroids because in a few nights the roaches at the ballpark had bulked up and the fans were chanting for some dude they were calling A-Roach.
These ‘roid-raging roaches had me riled. My wife wasn’t happy about my toxic bug spray or the nightly visitors herself. The bugs were about to pay.
She began researching the little varmints on the Internet and found there were two types of roaches in our area, the German and Chinese. She also found out how to do battle with the buggers.
A phone call at work informed me I should stop at the store and bring home a box of 20-Mule Team Borax. “I have a nasty little surprise for those roaches,” she laughed maniacally.
After searching the store high and low for the old-time detergent hawked by Ronald Reagan years ago on “Death Valley Days,” I finally located a box and discovered it was the cheapest laundry product in the store. Back at the house I informed my sweetie I had 20 mules on the box and quite possibly a dead president’s ashes inside.
That night the wife set to work on her diabolical plan which she said would involve making little Borax pies in bottle lids and leaving them in strategic places like livestock troughs for the bugs.
When I checked on her progress before bedtime I found that in addition to the little bottle cap pies she had poured a line of Borax all along the walls and cabinets. Our kitchen probably looked like White Sands National Monument to the roaches, I thought to myself.
By morning the body count had risen significantly with multiple bugs upside down on the tile with their little legs still twitching from their gluttonous pie eating contests. The wife cackled hysterically and got busy making even more pies.
About this same time we heard back from the plumbers that would finally be replacing the faulty PB plumbing. The bug carnage continued unabated until the plumbing contractor finished the work and repaired the holes in the drywall.
The body count quickly dropped off to almost nothing and most of the Borax has been cleaned from the crevices it had occupied. Sighting one of the crawling black bugs now is a rare thing.
I’m not about to say which had the greatest effect on the roach population, my wife’s home-cooked extermination plan or the repairs finally being made. All I know is the house flies had best leave now. The lady of the house has been Googling natural methods to exterminate the winged devils from her patio.
Karl Terry writes for Freedom New Mexico. Contact him at: karlterry@yucca.net
