The Infestation

Do you know what this is?

Yeah, that's a cricket.

If you just screamed at the top of your lungs like I do every time I go into my basement, I'm sorry.  But crickets are unfortunately on my mind, and now if I'm not mistaken, they are on yours.  Sorry, again.  Truly.

Okay, so I hate bugs.  There's nothing crazy about that.  I hate spiders and cockroaches and slugs and basically any other insect that looks like it wants to kill me.  Er, I mean scare me.  But this hatred I have for crickets tops them all.

I really, really, really hate them.

See when I was a young lass, the neighbor girls and I decided it would be fun to collect live crickets in a fish aquarium.  I have absolutely no clue why we did this, but we collected quite a few.  It was kind of an obsession of ours.  I'd say that aquarium was pretty much full of them by the time we stopped.

And stop we did.  Because when you start having dreams about crickets creeping into your bed and peeking out of every corner, you know you've gone too far.

I wish I could go back in time and tell my little former self to find a different hobby that summer.  Because to this day, I hate crickets.  And wouldn't you know it?  Karma's a bitch.

My house is infested with crickets.

At first, I thought we had some scary big spiders in the basement.  One day I went down to do the laundry and saw like six of them in front of the washing machine.  I screamed, went upstairs, and told my big, bad Airman to please kill them for me.  I'm not ashamed.

Turns out they are crickets.  Scary grasshopper-cricket hybrid looking things.  Kansas breeds them extra terrifying I guess. 

And now I'm finding them in other areas of the house.  Yesterday one was in Evie's bedroom!  Today, one sat next to my foot the entire time I cut up pork for the slow cooker.  I about peed my pants when I saw it.

I guess the lesson here folks is that if you see your innocent, naive little children start to collect bugs, tell them to back away slowly and make a run for it.  Because if they don't, it will haunt them until the end of their days.

I'm living proof.