A Case of the Crickets
The picture above is of a camel cricket, which around my house is known as the Holy Shit How Do I Kill This Christ-Fucking Thing. Pardon the swearing, but any world that allows for something that ugly and which is willing to jump three feet in your direction is not a world that is ruled by a benevolent god. I don't scare easy when it comes to bugs, but this week my trips to the storage space of my house in P.G. County have been more fraught with anxiety than I'd prefer. (It could be worse, though; when I first looked up info for the creature I erroneously Googled "camel spider" and got this.) Oh, we're out of coffee and I have to go to the basement to get more? Fuck it, I'll live without coffee for the next decade.
Yesterday's Post had a story about the recent infestation of camel crickets. "You have to smash them," says one person quoted in the story. I'm hoping for more nonconfrontational options. Any suggestions?
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Linked From: August 5th, 2008Washington City Paper: City Desk - Cricket Redux
11:28 am[...] attractive to creepy bugs that leap toward you when you try to shoo them away. The last time I was a big baby about this in public, a commenter suggested oven cleaner. I’m willing to try it, even if keeping a can of the [...]
11:17 am
I'll take the camel cricket over the coconut crab.
11:23 am
That crab is f*cked up! My husband drops a plastic cup over the cricket, puts a piece of paper underneath, and escorts the cricket outside. I roll up a magazine and smash them. They will also die if sprayed with oven cleaner.
11:42 am
Get a dog. Preferably a small, fat dog who's not fast or vicious enough to kill anything larger or tastier than a cricket. Ours works wonders on the camel crickets in our basement. One caveat: You will go from living, leaping, potentially-in-your-hair camel crickets to a field of mangled, half-chewed, still-twitching camel cricket corpses smeared into the basement floor.
(I'm not crazy about these little suckers either, but I'd take them over silverfish any day of the week and twice on Thursdays.)
2:29 pm
Yet another good reason for me to get a dog, Carrie. Thank you!
12:30 pm
I have recently killed 3 of these mutants bastards in my bathroom (well not me personally b/c as soon as turn the light on and see it I freeze). These offspring of Satan are going to cause a massive bladder problem if they keep showing up. I don't know where they came from but they can gladly go the f* back!~
5:25 pm
I'd shoot that mutherfucker with a 30-ot-6