Oh, good grief, why do I have this irrestible urge to click on these damn bug links?

I'm gonna need a drink to wash that last picture out of my mind before bedtime. nnnnnggghh

Bugs should not be large enough to look me in the eye. I met a giant praying mantis once at a gas station in Kentucky. The thing was easily as long as my forearm, sitting there on the gas pump, looking at me.

HELL NO I AM NOT CLICKING ANY OF THOSE LINKS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Pete warned me about something on the BBC site the other day, something about "spider labs". It sounds like a nifty article, and nifty science. Not gonna go read it.

I have major squick due to three years working in kitchens in the South. When I was in training, we came back from Christmas leave and opened up the cooking classroom and flicked on the lights and thousands of baby roaches went scurrying under the stove.

I had one of those moments when I lived in a duplex with roommates and opened the clothes dryer one day to see scores of tiny roaches come spilling out of the rubber door seal. That's the only time I recall being conscious of my sanity lurching - luckily I opted for regular bug bombing with as much pesticide as I thought the cats could stand rather than the General Sherman approach, but it could have gone either way.

What is up with you folks?! Now I am going to be seeing all manner of icky bugs in my dreams.

I did not need to know that there are giant frog eating bugs nearby. Denial is my friend.

Juliebird, I fitted a lightweight cat door ($5+shipping, iirc) into the screen of the window that I had been leaving open for the cats to go in and out of, and it has cut down quite a bit on the indoor bug population, even though I still leave the back door wide open most of the time.

I couldn't sleep just now but before I came downstairs, I was telling Joe that I didn't want to because I was sure I'd see roaches downstairs. We had an exterminator but he scared the crap out of me because, without saying anything about what he was going to do, he opened all our cupboards (like, where our plates and pots and pans are) and just started spraying. It did drastically reduce the roach sightings, but I decided I'd rather live with roaches the dishes sprayed monthly with chemicals.

We do, however, have roaches in our car due to all the food the kids drop in there. Really gross, I think, but fairly common among my friends here.

Just like there are no cats in America, I'm confident there are no roaches in Colorado.

I fitted a lightweight cat door ($5+shipping, iirc) into the screen of the window that I had been leaving open for the cats to go in and out of, and it has cut down quite a bit on the indoor bug population, even though I still leave the back door wide open most of the time.

Ooh, thanks -t, I was thinking about doing that but wasn't sure how to go about it. I was just gonna slash some flaps in the screen since it's already busted a bit.

I need to find/make a screen curtain for the front door because I too leave it flung open (I love it!)

Just like there are no cats in America, I'm confident there are no roaches in Colorado.

Heh-- that was one of the funniest thing about a pair of Florida kids moving to Cleveland-- Lewis and I were mystified by the tiny things that people called roaches and when the weather guy declared it a "very high humidity day" and followed it with "fifty-nine percent," we about fell off the sofa laughing.

Of course, our NE Ohio friends got to laugh right back at us that winter when, on the first night the temperatures were scheduled to dip really low, we called to ask if we needed to leave the faucets dripping and they couldn't figure out why. When we explained, they laughed their asses off-- hey, how were we supposed to know that in the northern part of the country they bury the pipes below the frost line? In Florida, you dig that deep and you wind up with a swamp.

Cilantro story in the sun today!

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Am very tired. My one cat has gotten into the bad habit of waking me up at 5 in the morning. Just to hang out. Plus I was up late getting ready to go to Chicago tonight so I can pick up my boyfriend and bring him back home to live in MY HOUSE! Whoa.