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[rmr]

I have a bug the size of Rhode Island under my sink. I'm a 30 year old woman you'd think I' could get over this, but I'm about to die. Is that bad?

I know rationally it's not going to kill or hurt me (although it probably could if it wanted to), but I can't get myself to touch it....am I a freak?

[lapietra]

...I don't think so! I can't handle *big* bugs myself.... smaller ones, if there's just one, I try to take outside on a piece of paper or something... but the big ones... usually I just spray the hell out of them, cringing the whole time.

If you don't have any roach/ant spray you can nuke him with, Windex or Formula 409 tend to do the trick! Or throw something big at it.
Good luck!

[Reg Barkley]

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[rmr]

ok, so here's the deal. I size up the situation and decide it's not good. I go to the bathroom and pull my hair up...just in case it wanted to jump at me and get tangled in my hair and roll my pants up. I don't really know why I did this, but it made me feel better.

I started scoping out the f'er from every direction. I wanted to make sure I was one step ahead of it at every moment. I grabbed some plastic bags and a spatula, along with a coat hanger (wooden) and a bottle of fantastic. In hind sight the thing must of have been dying since it was there for all of an hour before I could bring myself to do anything.

I made my move....I knocked over the bottle that it was hanging out on (pledge) and it started running around the floor. I dropped all my "weapons" and started screaming, I look over in the corner and my dog is just shaking as if we're both going to die at any moment. My cat jumps down and acts as if it's nothing and starts chasing it around the kitchen. Did I remind you of the size of the thing. I finally decide to start wacking it with my shoe....I hit like five times and the damn thing wouldn't die. Finally I took my shoe and managed to break it in half....I'm sure you're one step ahead me...yes one side continued to move. SO GROSS!!

It gets better I talked to my neighbor downstairs and was informed not to worry because these are afterwall SEWER ROACHES. You know not the ones that go after food. Is this supposed to make me feel better and then she informed me that she has found them in her bathtub.

Did I mention that I just bought this place??? So much for pride in ownership. I scared out of my mind and am on my first day of my shower strike.

[lapietra]

I completely sympathize with you. But most places in any city, especially if it's in an apartment building, come with free pets... it's sometimes a matter of living with a stripe of boric acid on your carpet lining all the walls, taking the trash out daily and getting the dishes done even before you sit down to eat...
I lived in university housing when I was in college and spent at least a couple hours a week spraying down cabinets & corners for roaches... I still saw them all the time, tiny baby ones and mid-sized... usually only saw the huge ones outside on the sidewalk. I thought I was doing pretty well keeping them at bay, until one day I opened the cabinet above the fridge, where I never stored anything, to find probably a hundred of them having a little party. I almost fell off the stepladder, grabbed a bottle of spray, covered my face with a dish towel and emptied the entire thing in there. They also liked to live in the oven... that's a smell I don't want to have to experience again...
I finally moved out of the apt. after about two years & got a room in a house... the owner was pretty good about keeping the place pest-free...
In my current place I just have ant visitations. About once a year we have a little two-week-long war... in the cat food, up through the flatware drawer into the kitchen sink... into the bathtub and the toilet via the drainpipes... Even though I always manage to discourage them for about 10 or 11 months, they always come back... But I would rather have to deal with hundreds of them than roaches. Ugh. Ugh, ugh, UGH.

[Frieda]

OMG that's a story.. i absolutely hate bugs.. i have a fear of anything that comes with tiny little wings and is able to sting or bite.. a wasp can totally freak me out!

roaches are pretty bad too.. the worst thing probably is that those creepy crawlers always show up in the place you'd least expect them to show up..

something else that's but a little bit off topic: stepped in a slug today. barefoot.

[elizawinter]

When is a bug too big to be a bug?? If it's too big to step on.
I had a similar situation with something that was far too big to step on. Huge. I later found out that it was a sun spider (not actually a spider at all but a kind of JUMPING scorprion that looks more like an extra terrestrial. Look them up on line. I had nighmares forever... and I wasn't brave enough to go after it- even with bags and coathangers. I dropped a bowl over it and waited until someone else came home.

[lapietra]

They're pretty harmless, you know... but I wouldn't pick one up!

[saskuoch]

That's disgusting!

Since I usually live in Houston, I'm familiar with the roach/ant/termite war inside buildings. Once during my freshman year of college, a friend and I were sitting in his room and we saw this two inch roach just hiking across the floor. Those suckers are really hard to squish! So we took one of his roommate's really big music theory books (he's a music major) that we were pretty sure he didn't use much, and dropped it on the bug. Neither one of us wanted to pick it up to see if our little friend was really dead, so we just left the book there. Being kind of a messy guy, it was about a week until his roommate picked up his book, only to discover a cockroach pancake adhered to the back. I'm not sure he ever suspected that we did it intentionally. Perhaps it's because he's Australian.

Another one of my "favorite" Houston bug battles is June bugs. They're these gold colored beetles come in late May, and take over backyards and pools. When you go outside, they'll happily land on you, fly into your face, etc. Really gross little critters, and they like to "swim" (also known as committing suicide) and fill up the filter baskets in the swimming pool.

Hong Kong lies about 100 miles inside the tropics, and is extremely rainy and humid, so one would think it is a bug paradise. In fact, I think I've encountered one or two roaches, and slapped about six mosquitos in the month+ that I've been here. If even the bugs can't survive in this city, how does that bode for humans? What exactly is in that big grey cloud that never seems to blow away? And why is all the water in the streams that sick grey-green color? Hmmmm. I'm a little disturbed.

[red]

I'm so jealous. Whenever we go thru a dry spell or a really wet spell the tree roaches come inside. That is when I am glad I have cats. They hunt them down and kill them. Most of them.
The roaches they don't find my husband will hear. (I don't know how he does it, but I'm glad he can.) One night we were drifting off to sleep and suddenly he jolts straight up in bed and flips the light on. He whizzes around and looks at the headboard where we both see two antennea moving. I scream and jump out of bed while he gets a shoe and tries to kill it. He misses.
"Omigod, OMIGOD! WHERE IS IT! I CAN'T GO BACK TO SLEEP WITH IT STILL ALIVE!"
"Relax, I'll hear it again."
I am not convinced.
So we spend 5 minutes looking for this stupid roach and can't find it. I give up. We are both wide awake and listening for the roach. Time passes and I am almost asleep and the whole thing starts all over again. This time I don't scream I just grab a shoe too and look for the little sleep-depriving bastard.
Kitty gets him. Good kitty.

[beyondzeek]

I have hated those useless, mindlessly suicidal things since I was six, when I was looking up into a tree, and one landed ON MY EYEBALL! It stayed, too, clinging to my cornea while I ran around screaming in my Nana's front yard. I still run off the porch whenever one of those damn things blindly smacks into my head at 4 or 5 miles and hour, and the eyeball thing happened 32 years ago!!

[DarkPadawan]

On the subject of bugs. I get a call from a friend a couple of weeks ago and she has come home for lunch to find a spider on the outside of her back deck window. Now spiders are not normally a problem for me...especially when they're outside and I'm inside. My friend tells me that she's a bit concerned about this though because the spider is as big as one of the panes in the window. Yes folks, you heard that right. Well after having her describe the thing to me I realize that she's not exaggerating about the size and without knowing much else to do, she calls animal control.

At the first few words of her description, animal control transfers her to a special wildlife agency that the state of Georgia has hired to track and capture (when possible) the movement of Goliath Bird Spiders in the state. Apparently someone once brought these things into the country from South America as pets and their population is growing. Now all this information may not be nearly as skin crawling as this picture.

Goliath Bird Spider

This wildlife group says that they've been tracking the species down around Macon, Georgia (which gets close to Florida) but this was the first that they'd heard up in our area. I live about 10 minutes east of downtown atlanta and she lives about 30 minutes south.

If these things move north of the city that she lives in(mainly, in my direction)...I am outta here!

[saskuoch]

I looked at that picture and shreiked out loud! That's the scariest thing I can imagine seeing on my window, especially since they sting and bite!

Now my roommate thinks I'm crazier than she did before. She doesn't speak really good English, and just now after I screamed at the computer and closed the window after verifying that those suckers do bite, I started babbling in really fast English trying to explain how horrifying that thing is and how someone saw it on her window, etc. I won't open it back up for her to see, though. I think the roommie's gonna be glad to be rid of the neurotic American in December.

[rmr]

Have any of you seen the movie the twilight zone? I think it may have been ted danson in the one about the roaches and he lived in New York and is deathly afraid of them and he lives in a vacum compressed apartment (sealed tight), but in the end they get him anyway? They start crawling out of his mouth and stuff. I think that got me started on my fear. Also, the movie Deadly Blessings with Earnest Borgnain he plays an amish guy and these woman (buxom blondes) move to his amish town and he proceeds to kill them all for bringing sin in. Anyway there's a scene in the movie ( I think it's a dream sequence) and there's this girl and she's sleeping or something and a huge spider comes down from the ceiling and lands in her mouth. That scene has stuck with me all these years.

I'm seriously going to be ill!!!

[Frieda]

aw god i can't take this anymore.. please stop this!

but seriously, DarkPadawan,

These animals readily flick painful urticating hairs, and when provoked will bite with their one inch long fangs!

your friend had this ~thing~ in her house?? hmmmmmm this would've been me: