not a cockroach

It all started on Christmas Eve. Peter had retired early and was all snug in his bed without a care, and I wandered into the kitchen to get a drink and OMG there were three (aack yes, THREE) cockroaches scuttling around on the floor. I quickly grabbed the Shoe of Death and somehow smacked them all to smithereens and it was only after I had taken care of disposing of their ghastly corpses (and the adrenaline started to wear off) that I started to wonder what the hell roaches were doing in my house IN WINTER. In over 33 years, and in all my different Casa Azahars, I had only ever come across 2 or 3 of the fuckers during the summer, which was bad enough. But then I remembered that I actually had 5 sightings last summer, which was unusual. And I have never seen more than one at a time. When I told Peter the next morning he joked about having been visited by the ghosts of Christmas roaches past (not funny).

Anyhow, since then I started seeing random roaches and I wondered if it had something to do with one of the shops downstairs that had had its drains flushed out mid-December. Maybe the roaches had been disturbed and started scattering throughout the building? I don’t know. I finally mentioned it to my downstairs neighbour who insisted she hadn’t seen any so I let it go until I finally couldn’t any more (had actually taken to sleeping with the lights on as sightings had become so frequent). I told my landlord about the problem just over a week ago and on Monday he sent over Pepe Matacucas (Roach Slaying Joe – not his real name) to check things out and he discovered that they were indeed (aaargh) nesting in the kitchen. So today he came over again to, well, slay roaches.

I am not going to go into detail about any of it other to say that it was possibly one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. Pepe had wanted to fumigate but of course that was out of the question with the cats (unless we moved out for a month) so he went with doing a deep-clean of every area under the cupboards and appliances, slaying as he went, and applying killer gel. All of which is way out reach for the cats. Then he said… now we wait and see. He felt sure with that treatment any remaining roaches would either die or move on (they are always everywhere, let’s be honest) but that he was going to talk to my landlord about fumigating the drains downstairs.

So why are you looking at pizzas (actually a pizza and a calzone)? Because I couldn’t bear to post another roachy image here. After Pepe left and we did a massive cleanup, washing floors, disinfecting surfaces, and finally showering there was no way I was going to cook anything (or possibly enter my kitchen ever again). So Peter popped out to Alimentari e Diversi for emergency pizza and now it’s time to Netflix and attempt to forget, though I am pretty sure I now have permanent PTHJ.