Here a roach, there a roach.....

....and not the fun kind, either!!

So this past week was my first week of running BOTH the preschool program AND our after school enrichment program. It's all a lot of work, and I am completely exhausted, but it is actually significantly less stressful than I would have thought. I think the full year that I had to prepare for all of this certainly came in handy :). Anyway, last night I was, well, drooling in my catatonic state and trying not to get any of it on my batik quilt from Bali when I heard this crispy little tapping sound and a dark shape eclipsed the light in my room.

It was a GIGANTIC cockroach....and it was flying! FLYING!!! Now, I live in a very large tower full of very large condos. My building is pretty old, it's located in SE Asia, and we are currently knee deep (literally) in rainy season at the moment. All of these ingredients, when mixed well, create a Cockroach Nirvana. And in spite of compulsive cleanliness and monthly, condo-wide sprays of some sketchy pesticide that is probably chock full o' carcinogens (and, seriously, I invite the carcinogens with open, um, nostrils to have a full on party in my veins if it means no cockroaches), these GIGANTIC, shelled creatures with their creepy, translucent eyes are just a fact of life here. And to say that I find them repulsive is as vast an understatement as, oh I dunno, saying that Sarah Palin is a scary, scary redneck. However, the one fact about these huge cockroaches that gave me some comfort is the fact that I had never seen one take flight, and foolishly assumed that they somehow could not, in fact, fly.

So I lay there trying to convince myself that it was totally a MOTH I was seeing. Sadly, though, it was not, and I had to hide under my batik quilt several times when the cockroach came dangerously close to my head. It was almost comical watching it fly, as the burnt potato chips it calls wings could not support its weight very well. It flew off to another corner of the room to bob awkwardly like a yo-yo in unskilled hands and I made a mad dash for the Can O' Raid (scented with lavender!), and started shooting at the roach all crazy-like. It was as if I was transported back to my eight-year-old self playing Duck Hunt on the old school NES--complete with the glazed eyes and rhythmic obscenities cascading from my lips and punctuated with victory dance when the f***er finally goes DOWN.

I hit the roach and kept spraying until its spindly little legs stopped wiggling. Now, the thing is that I am SO scared of roaches that I have a hard time picking them up even after they're dead. I have to sit there with my dustpan taking deep breaths to ward off the lightheaded feeling. Then, I have to say a few words in my head for my fallen adversary, and I have to give myself a "you can do this, just be brave!" pep talk. I have to remind myself that a roach can't come alive again, rip my head off, and carry it off to the nest in order to create a throne for the Queen Roach out of my lower jaw.

After managing to dispose of the flying roach I promptly fell asleep, only to wake up a few hours later due to some crazy, Raid-induced nightmares. I hopped out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen to retrieve a bottle of water from the fridge without bothering to turn on any lights or put on the slippers that I usually wear for gliding across the parquet floors that are perpetually dusty. And then....CRUNCH. The most sickening sound I've ever heard, followed by the realization that there was a hard knot of something crumbling (and maybe even oozing a little bit?!) under my foot. I'm pretty sure I had an out-of-body experience right then and there, and after returning I was finally able to remove my foot from the wreckage, hobble over to the light switch, and look at the sparkling pieces of dead cockroach that made a trail over to where I was standing. The cockroach had been dead for an hour or two (most likely as a result of the fresh roach poison that I recently put out) and had gotten good and crunchy in the humid heat of my living room.

I scrubbed and scrubbed my foot a la Lady Macbeth, and now I'm getting devoured by mosquitos in the lobby (where the free internet is) as I type this. Sweet. Between this and the rat scratches, I'm just waiting for typhoid to stumble onto a shady spot in my internal organs, spread out a blanket, and decide that this is a lovely place for a picnic.