The Intruder

It's never a pleasant thought to imagine anyone but yourselves in your home. I want to feel safe in my home. I want to relax without being on the lookout for my worst fear. And I don't want to be alone at home when it happens. But Joel was at work today when I found the intruder crawling across the bathroom floor.

People may make fun of my many flip flops, but you don't know how reliable and trustworthy they are until they are put to the test. Today, it was a pink flip flop that saved me.

The good news: I killed one cockroach. The bad news: There's never just ONE cockroach.

Three seemingly small issues have just combined into a nightmare situation. Issue number one: We only do dishes every few days. Issue number two: Our bathroom sink leaks just a little. Issue number three: For the past year, we've always had a couple ants in our bathtub. No matter how many we kill, they won't go away, and I had finally settled on coexisting with them. Like a door-to-door cult, always coming in pairs, but never in crowds, we had agreed to disagree with them. They thought the bathtub was theirs, we thought it was ours. When it was their turn, they could explore the porcelain. When it was our turn, they died in a torrential downpour followed by a whirlpool. We could've continued on for quite some time under this alliance, but now they have betrayed us. We let our guard down. We became complacent.

Three seemingly small situations welcome cockroaches. One: Dirty Dishes. Two: Damp, dark areas. Three: Dead bugs (ants). But there are two more important factors that do not welcome cockroaches: Joel and Jean.

The war starts now. We are going to launch an Israeli preemptive strike. The sword of the Lord and the Bug Spray of Beldings!