Well Valentine's Day came and went - good riddance I say. Valentine's Day is no fun when you don't have a "special someone", or when the one you love is being a pain in the ass. I had a multitude of errands I had to run yesterday. During football season my car radio is tuned to NFL news or other football talk. Since football season is over, the sports stations are talking baseball, basketball and hockey. Eeeeww, eeewww, eeewwww - not a fan. So driving around I tried to find music I liked. Ha! Friggin love songs on every single station! Even the Spanish speaking and Vietnamese speaking stations! Could not escape the love songs. Eventually I turned to Christian radio, all I got out of that was guilt. Couldn't escape the visual signs of love in the air either. It was all over the place. There was a friggin flower/Valentine's Day stand on every corner! If it wasn't a full blown stand, it was some little Mexican dude or dudette selling roses out of buckets. At one point, feeling particularly ornery, I had the urge to run my car right through one of those tents and scatter love petals from here to kingdom come!
Ah, I'm not really an ogre when it comes to love. And I don't hate Valentine's Day. I'm really a big softie and appreciate love in all its forms of expression. I think I was just having a bad day yesterday. It's almost a year to the day that I had to put my Ginger down. This is killing me. I've been in tears, or on the verge of tears for days now. I can't stop thinking about her and I miss her so much. A part of me died with her I think.
Piper and I had our own celebration of Valentine's Day. We went to the nursery and bought ourselves more plants for our patio. Flowering plants. I don't know where we will fit them in on our patio, we have so little room out there now as it is. But it seemed like a flower sort of day and we like the ones you can put in the dirt and let live on. We'll make room. We always seem to have enough room for one more flowering plant.
But here's how the day ended. As I was getting ready for bed, Piper called me from the kitchen. Her voice held the unmistakeable hint of anxious distress. I went to her immediately. As I came around the corner to the kitchen I saw her standing frozen in the hallway. She pointed to a spot on the floor in front of the oven. I looked. I saw a gigantic black mass. It took a full minute to register that I was looking at the biggest cockroach I'd ever seen in my life! This was the Ancient Mother of all cockroaches, and it was twitching it's damn radar antennae around in MY kitchen! What the "F" to do?? Stand there gaping for one. It was too big to kill. We didn't have tranquilizer darts or flame throwers. We didn't have a net, rocket launcher or grenade. We finally decided to get a box over the top of it and go from there - yes, that's how big it was! Long as Buntah, and Buntah is the length of the palm of my hand! That MoFo, was big enough to be transportation!
We found a box, but now who was going to do the actual capture. Well, as the parent of the house, you automatically draw the short stick by default. As the only parent, it is your duty to render the house safe for habitation no matter the size or shape of the foe or intruder. I gathered my nerve, snuck up on it as close as I dared, I could feel the wind generated by the spin of it's antennae, then dropped the box. Got em! But now what?! I looked at Piper. She looked at me. We held our breath and neither of us moved. We could it hear scraping frantically at the sides of the box. We feared. Piper found something heavy to put on top of the box. I decided it would be better to resolve this issue during day light hours. We got supplies from the kitchen for the rest of the night and morning - neither of us were going back in the kitchen as long as that box with the roach was still in it - then went to bed. You wouldn't be surprised to learn neither of slept would you? Well we didn't. We just knew that bastard was going to wait till we closed our eyes to call on it's King Kong strength then toss the box off and come after us.
Eventually, this morning I found a piece of cardboard larger than the box, and thin enough to slide under it without having to lift it. That part worked out alright, except that I could hear the cockroach and feel it fighting back. It was terribly traumatizing. With the cardboard in place, I carried it out the door, across the street behind the Critter Control business to meet it's demise. "Mr. Demise, meet Mr. CR. Do your duty!" I held my breath, leaned down to the ground, slid the box off the cardboard and turned to run all in the same slick movement. It was an impressive move. Mr. Demise took over immediately, as that MoFo Mr. CR came out with a broken neck. I thought I'd heard a snap at some point! Anyway, I left it there in it's final throes of death twitching. Left the box too, tossed the cardboard in the dumpster then came home for a decontamination shower of blanching hot water and Clorox! It was the only way I could get my skin to stop with the creepy crawlies.
Ah, I'm not really an ogre when it comes to love. And I don't hate Valentine's Day. I'm really a big softie and appreciate love in all its forms of expression. I think I was just having a bad day yesterday. It's almost a year to the day that I had to put my Ginger down. This is killing me. I've been in tears, or on the verge of tears for days now. I can't stop thinking about her and I miss her so much. A part of me died with her I think.
Piper and I had our own celebration of Valentine's Day. We went to the nursery and bought ourselves more plants for our patio. Flowering plants. I don't know where we will fit them in on our patio, we have so little room out there now as it is. But it seemed like a flower sort of day and we like the ones you can put in the dirt and let live on. We'll make room. We always seem to have enough room for one more flowering plant.
But here's how the day ended. As I was getting ready for bed, Piper called me from the kitchen. Her voice held the unmistakeable hint of anxious distress. I went to her immediately. As I came around the corner to the kitchen I saw her standing frozen in the hallway. She pointed to a spot on the floor in front of the oven. I looked. I saw a gigantic black mass. It took a full minute to register that I was looking at the biggest cockroach I'd ever seen in my life! This was the Ancient Mother of all cockroaches, and it was twitching it's damn radar antennae around in MY kitchen! What the "F" to do?? Stand there gaping for one. It was too big to kill. We didn't have tranquilizer darts or flame throwers. We didn't have a net, rocket launcher or grenade. We finally decided to get a box over the top of it and go from there - yes, that's how big it was! Long as Buntah, and Buntah is the length of the palm of my hand! That MoFo, was big enough to be transportation!
We found a box, but now who was going to do the actual capture. Well, as the parent of the house, you automatically draw the short stick by default. As the only parent, it is your duty to render the house safe for habitation no matter the size or shape of the foe or intruder. I gathered my nerve, snuck up on it as close as I dared, I could feel the wind generated by the spin of it's antennae, then dropped the box. Got em! But now what?! I looked at Piper. She looked at me. We held our breath and neither of us moved. We could it hear scraping frantically at the sides of the box. We feared. Piper found something heavy to put on top of the box. I decided it would be better to resolve this issue during day light hours. We got supplies from the kitchen for the rest of the night and morning - neither of us were going back in the kitchen as long as that box with the roach was still in it - then went to bed. You wouldn't be surprised to learn neither of slept would you? Well we didn't. We just knew that bastard was going to wait till we closed our eyes to call on it's King Kong strength then toss the box off and come after us.
Eventually, this morning I found a piece of cardboard larger than the box, and thin enough to slide under it without having to lift it. That part worked out alright, except that I could hear the cockroach and feel it fighting back. It was terribly traumatizing. With the cardboard in place, I carried it out the door, across the street behind the Critter Control business to meet it's demise. "Mr. Demise, meet Mr. CR. Do your duty!" I held my breath, leaned down to the ground, slid the box off the cardboard and turned to run all in the same slick movement. It was an impressive move. Mr. Demise took over immediately, as that MoFo Mr. CR came out with a broken neck. I thought I'd heard a snap at some point! Anyway, I left it there in it's final throes of death twitching. Left the box too, tossed the cardboard in the dumpster then came home for a decontamination shower of blanching hot water and Clorox! It was the only way I could get my skin to stop with the creepy crawlies.