Conquering the Giant Cockroach

Another 10!

Maybe a 9 because of the initial fear and hesitation when we had a second meeting in my bathroom tonight, but ultimately I conquered the fear, grabbed a spatula and mixing bowl and chased him down in my bedroom.  The first time I got him in the bowl he escaped (who knew they were so quick?), but Murph’s attempt to eat him scared him so much it was easy to capture him again.  And that time I was prepared with a tank top, gym shorts, and eventually a towel to throw on top of him and make sure he didn’t escape.  I brought the bowl downstairs and outside where he was released into the wild.

VICTORY!

Side note: After evaluating student drawings of cockroaches in class tonight (yes, that’s what we do here in grad school), I’m pretty sure this guy isn’t a roach.  Leaves me clueless as to what exactly he is, besides a giant, fast and super gross bug.  That’s enough to make me want to get rid of him…

I Have a Roommate

I love living alone.  In fact, it’s perhaps one of my favorite parts of adulthood.  So you can imagine how excited I was when I found this in my bathroom:

I’m not sure the picture does it justice.  Literally this guy is about 3 inches long. I knew there had to be bad times to hate killing bugs and this is definitely one of them.  I want to get nowhere near this to try and catch it and release outside.  But at the same time, it’s so big killing it would be like killing a rabbit or something.  I certainly can’t do that.

5 minutes later when I returned he was gone.  Which means he could be anywhere in my apt, including my bed, making babies as we speak so they’ll be swarming everywhere.  The good news is, Murphy has a fondness for bugs and might try to eat it.  The bad news is, he’d probably choke and die if he actually caught it.

I rate this the most definitive ZERO of the year.