David vs. Goliath

(This story may not be for the faint of heart :) )

Man...I feel like it has been forever since I have posted anything. It has been a busy few days, both inside and outside of the office. My work has really picked up in the past week, and even though this past weekend was my first weekend to not go out of town since the semester has been over, I didn't really relax much. Pretty much every moment was planned (as usual), and I didn't even clean my house or do my bills until last night (let me just say, I felt the tension leave my shoulders when I took some time to get stuff organized...as I was driving to work yesterday, I had such an uneasy feeling about "life" as a whole, and I think it was directly related to the lack of order that existed all around me).

I have a story about the events of my morning to share, but it really takes some background before I share it...this will be a pretty long one (sorry for that).

I have lived in my apartment for about 4 1/2 years. Every year when there is a major shift in temperature, I have had to deal with a visit from this massive bug. Usually just one or two times a year do I have this encounter, but there was one year where I had to slay 3 or 4 of them. I am not quite sure what the bug is, but it is about an inch and a half to two inches long, and it has the ability to fly. It resembles a cockroach, but I have never in my life seen one this big, nor have I ever known that a roach is able to fly.

My very first encounter was my first spring in my apartment. It had just started warming up outside, and I was up late one night of my spring break, working on a paper that was due before the end of the semester. The way that my apartment was set up at the time, my computer desk was in my dining room facing the kitchen and the hallway coming down from my bedroom. I was sitting there, minding my own business and frantically working on my paper, when all of a sudden this monstrous thing comes flying down my hall, into my dining room and lands on my computer desk in front of me. I freaked out...jumped up, knocked my chair over, start moving things around on my desk as it crawled its way to the bottom of it. Finally I was able to squash it and call the EMS workers in to remove the body (joke :), but it did take some cleaning up to remove its remains). As I cleaned up the wreckage (and the body), and my heart rate began to get back to normal, I wondered what in the heck I had gotten myself into by moving into that apartment.

Over the course of the last 4 1/2 years, as I said, I have had several different encounters. At least one a year. One was crawling down my hall (the first time an x-girlfriend had ever seen my apartment...and she discovered it...what a great first impression), another was staring at me from atop my ironing board when I came home one night, one (the one that probably freaked me out the most) was actually under my covers.

Today's adventure is just as eventful as some of those previous ones. I had already hit my snooze alarm a couple of times, and I had decided to reset my alarm for ten more minutes. I had just crawled back into bed, and I began to hear a clicking noise. I thought that it was coming from my air duct, but as I looked towards my ceiling, I noticed the silhouette of something on my light fixture. Crawling out from the inside of my light fixture was one of my yearly visitors. I of course realized in an instant what it was, so I jumped out of my bed, turned on the light, ran to the kitchen to grab a paper towel, ran back into the room just in time to see him fly to the floor and scurry towards my bed. I threw up the comforter that was hanging down over the sides, and luckily caught him coming out the other side. Let me just tell you...I was awake at that point. My heart was going about a hundred miles a minute.

Please, if anyone out there has had this problem...tell me how to stop them from getting into my stinkin' home.