Time To Move!

I was coming home from a late night of Bingo with Pamie and Stee and trying to make sure the Denny's Zesty Creole Scrambler I had just devoured stayed down when I entered my apartment's elevator with one of my neighbors. She recognized me before I recognized her, and said to me, in her delightful Irish lilt: "I remember you -- you're the one who accused my friends of robbing your apartment!"

Now, while she is right about that, there is a little bit of backstory here. Basically, I came home from work and saw a small group of unfamiliar people (she had recently moved to that apartment and I had never seen her before, nor was I even aware that the guy who used to live next to me had even moved out) playing around with someone's doorknob. When they saw me, they took off. Then I went into my apartment and found that it had been robbed. Believing that I may have stumbled upon the culprits, I then turned around and chased them down and asked them if they had just robbed my apartment. I know now that confronting a group of potential apartment thieves is not a good idea. At the time, though, I was a little freaked out and I just wanted my computer back. Anyway, they said they did not and the woman introduced herself as my neighbor and then told me to go call the police, which I did. And that was it.

Now, three months later, she was demanding an apology from me. The elevator had long since stopped at our floor, but she had positioned herself between me and the door so that I was trapped in there until I gave in to her demands. Which I had no problem doing, since I really had to go to the bathroom and wanted to get home and also because I did, after all, accuse her of breaking into my apartment. Which, by the way, I'm still not sure she didn't do. Because after she was satisifed with my apology, we walked down the hallway and she asked me a lot of questions about how I thought the person broke in and what the police said to me and if they had any leads. She was way too interested.

So I finally managed to escape from her and get into my apartment and pee, and what should be waiting for me in the bathroom? This:

AYYYYIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Horrible! But not so horrible that I didn't have the sense to whip out my brand-new camera and test out its macro abilities:

Giant cockroaches are amazingly disgusting, but the amount of detail my camera captured here is just amazing.

Look! You can even see the hairs on its legs! I love my new camera.

Anyway, once I couldn't take the giant cockroach's wildly waving antenna anymore, I had to kill it. Not an easy task. My usual method of unsavory bug murder is to spray them with my bleach cleaning products, which were readily available in the bathroom. I did this while making all manner of shrieks and horrified moans, which will probably earn me another elevator confrontation with that neighbor, who shares the bathroom wall with me. People, the bleach didn't work. I mean, I have killed big furry spiders with that stuff, and this cockroach barely flinched.

Aerial attacks unsuccessful, I knew I would have to go in for some hand-to-hand combat. I grabbed a leftover cup from a Wendy's Frosty Dairy Dessert I had consumed a few days ago (between Denny's and Wendy's, I really, really have to start eating better) and tried to capture the bug under it. I was ultimately successful in this quest, but then I didn't know what to do next. Also, I had to keep my hand on the top of the cup or else the cockroach could move it. Horror.

Obviously, the only thing to do was to get the giant cockroach into my toilet and flush it away, as it was too big to squash (I had encountered one of these in my apartment once before and ended up using a hammer to kill it. And it took THREE BLOWS to do it. Never again, people) and simply letting it go unharmed is NOT AN OPTION. I managed to slip a stiff piece of cardboard under the cup (regular paper would have been too filmsy for a bug of this size and weight) and then I just threw everything into the toilet bowl. I carefully picked the cardboard and cup out of the bowl and threw them away.

So now the cockroach is in the toilet bowl. I wanted to wait for it to drown and be absolutely fucking sure it was dead before flushing it, or else I wouldn't be able to sit on my toilet bowl without wondering if the cockroach had managed to climb back up through the pipes and was about to launch a surprise attack on my bare ass. It's one in the morning. I need to wake up early for work tomorrow. The cockroach had managed to climb up the side of the bowl enough to keep its horrible head above water. It was not going to drown.

So I took my toilet bowl cleaner out of the cabinet and poured that into the bowl. That finally did it. I don't know if it was the chemicals or the thing finally drowned or both, but it finally died. The antenna would wave no more. I flushed it down the toilet, hoping it wasn't so big that it would clog the pipes, and did a few follow-up flushes before finally feeling safe enough to sleep.

Happy Father's Day from Court TV

Now, I love Court TV as much as the next person, but their Father's Day Movie Marathon leaves something to be desired:

Skeletons in the Closet: Will Reid is forced to confront the unthinkable…that his 18-year-old son may be a serial killer. But is his son truly guilty or is he a paranoid, unstable man who for years has hidden secrets about his own past?

Child in the Night: A detective who is desperate for help on a homicide case calls in a psychologist to assist the memory of an eight-year-old who witnessed his father being killed.

Evil Has a Face: Bonding with a young molestation victim unearths a police artist's memories of childhood abuse by her stepfather.

Here's hoping next year's lineup will be chosen by someone who doesn't hate fathers!