escaping wildlife!

Ginormous insect encounter #2: Night of the Monster Cricket

The other night I was settled into bed listening to the sounds of the neighborhood (dogs howling, music thumping from the park across the way and the neighbor’s tv—which she turns up all the way and then opens her door, yeah, she’s awesome) when above the din I hear the loudest cricket ever. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever heard one so loud in my life. My first thought is oh crap, he’s in my house. I’ve played that game before for weeks at a time playing hide and seek with him as he makes noise only when the lights are out and just when I think he’s gone he’ll come back for an encore. So, at 3am I turned the lights on and sure enough he stopped but not before I realized it was actually coming from outside.

Out on my deck, just outside the door is a large drain. The chirping echoed in its cavernous depths (it’s like 3 whole inches deep!) I did the only thing I could think of, poured boiling water down the drain to try to drown the sucker. Of course, that plan backfired and I only succeeded in chasing him out of the drain and onto the deck. The thing was the size of my fist! (What is it in the water here that grows monster bugs? Maybe that’s why no one drinks it.) I run back in to turn on the light and grab some ammunition and then head back out in my slippers screeching and hopping around trying to avoid him while simultaneously whacking at him with a shoe on the end of each hand. I’m sure it was an awesome sight. Especially when I finally got him. Just enough to stop the hopping so I could pummel him another twenty times, scrape his twitching body up the side of the half-wall and fling him into the darkness.

I slept the well-earned sleep of the victorious for the rest of the night. Critters 0, Amy 2.

Alas, no pictures of this one either. (Did you not read the part where I said I had shoes on both my hands? It's physically impossible to hold a camera with your shoes!)