What should have been a good night’s sleep last night because I was sufficiently tired and ready to sleep was rudely interrupted by the sound of a chirping cricket in my bedroom. I am not one of those people that have to have complete silence to sleep. Complete darkness I like and the colder the better. I do run a fan for the noise and the cool factor. I occasionally even go to sleep with a cd playing. But I have always hated crickets and the sound they make. I think I have a deep seated fear of crickets and cicadas in particular because my brothers used to torture me by throwing them at me and putting them in my bed along with cottonwood beetles who as far as I know are just hideously ugly but don’t make a sound.
Years ago I remember waking up one night because a cricket was chirping in my bedroom. I was about 14 at the time and shared a room with my sister Connie. I went on a hunt that time too for the cricket. I pulled furniture from the wall, looked under the bed, practically emptied the closet looking for it. When it stopped chirping I figured it had gone into another room and I headed back to bed. I lay down on the bed, looked over and the cricket was sitting on my sister Connie’s legs. I grabbed a magazine and whacked the cricket as hard as I could. Connie woke up in terror wondering why she was being hit. She was pretty mad at me. She still remembers it too.
So back to last night. I tried to ignore it, tried to cover my ears with a pillow to block out the sound. Finally, when I could stand it no more, I got up, found the can of raid and went on a cricket hunt. Picture a crazed, annoyed me in the middle of the night with my cpap mask on (I unhooked the hose but didn’t want to take off the mask because it was at optimum comfort fit, something hard to achieve), in my nightgown with a can of raid pulling furniture from its place, moving various knickknacks searching for the cricket that was keeping me awake. Not to mention that I think this particular cricket was a ventriloquist because just as I would think I had isolated the sound and was getting close, the sound would move. Finally, I pulled the dresser out from the wall and there it was. Chirping away, not a care in the world. I think he had a look of utter shock on his little cricket face when he saw me. CPAP masks are so attractive. Sort of the Darth Vadar look. I sprayed him with Raid. The worst thing about killing bugs is you have to dispose of them and to pick up a dead bug just creeps me out. So I had to go upstairs to retrieve the vacuum so I could vacuum up the bug. So while I was up and with the vacuum out I just vacuumed the entire downstairs.
Finally, I am settled back in, under the covers, ready to return to a very good dream I was having about someone (I’ll never tell) and Quincy the Yorkie decided to have a scratch fest under the bed. Quincy has been suffering from a skin allergy for a few weeks that sends him into these crazed scratching attacks where he whines, rolls around on the floor, scratches uncontrollably….which is a very annoying sound. So I get up, coax him out from under the bed (ok I turned on the vacuum and scared him out from under the bed) put him in the hallway and shut the door to my room. Back to bed, settle in, Quincy decided to bark. And whine. And scratch at the bedroom door to be let back in. Which I did. Only to have him return under the bed and go nuts again. So,I got up, gave him an oatmeal bath, drugged him with a Benadryl, considered drugging myself but didn’t.
Finally, peace and quiet except that the alarm started going off way too soon. After hitting the snooze button as many times as I could possibly hit it and still make it to work on time, I finally got up. And headed to the shower. Only to find not one, but two of those bugs I call sprickets because they look like spiders but jump like crickets. I hate that. I have been known to pray on the way to the shower that there will be no sprickets to deal with that morning. Lord, please let my shower be spricketless today. I drowned the sprickets, took a deep breath, picked them up with a paper towel (cause I can’t vacuum in the shower) and flushed them down the toilet.
It must be torture LeeAnn with bug day because there was a slug on Shelby’s dog food dish, the ants had taken over my kitchen counter. And just as I got to my car a Grasshopper jumped from the yard next door to torment me, landing by my foot and causing me to “scream like a girl” and drop my lunch, much to the delight of the little boy next door who saw it happened and felt the need to say “geez it’s just a bug!” as he laughed out loud.
First thing when I sit at my desk this morning an employee comes in and says “I hate to bug you but……”. And wondered why I started to laugh. Oh, that there was a can of spray for people who bug me. Some days the floor would be littered with carcasses. LOL
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