2002-12-04 - 3:42 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Forever Young", Rod Stewart

Over the summer, my mom kept bringing us vegetables from her garden. We ate a lot of her lettuce and basil, and a few jalapeno peppers. She also brought us a few tomatoes.

Thing is, the tomatoes were very small and VERY CUTE. The first tomato was a perfect little round thing, the size of a golf ball. I fell in love with it -- I love circles and spheres -- and named it Pete.

When we took Pete home, I arranged a shirt or something on my lap and stuck Pete in the middle of it so he wouldn't get squished. Poindexter glanced over and said, "Oh, look! You made a nest for Pete!"

Needless to say, we never ate Pete. He sat there, looking cute, until he rotted.

After that, I didn't name any more tomatoes.

So, guess what.

My house is not, precisely, roach-free, although it's much closer to it than the apartment was.

I had left eight sticky traps out in the kitchen for 3-4 days on two separate occasions and never caught anything. So I was feeling relatively safe. The roach nightmares had subsided, finally.

Then, one day, someone spied a roach in the laundry room (a room which is half-underground).

Guess who that "someone" was? My MIL, of course. How embarrassing.

Luckily, she is used to bugs, living in Florida, and wasn't at all perturbed. She just wanted me to handle the problem. I asked her how big it was, and she held out her thumb and forefinger to what I thought was 1.5-2". Groan.

So, I said, "Let's name it. What's a name we really hate?" And Poindexter said, "Geezer". (Actually, the geezer's real first name.) So he was Geezer the First (and, hopefully, the Last).

I was nervous about a nest in the house, but Poindexter was convinced that Geezer had "taken a wrong turn and ended up in the wrong house." Since that floor is at ground level, if a single roach is going to wander in, that's where it'll end up.

Anyway, I put the sticky traps out, and on the second or third day, MIL came upstairs and said, "You caught Geezer!"

I made Poindexter come downstairs with me, holding my hand, to find Geezer. When I finally figured out which of the sticky traps he was on, I was surprised. He was SMALL! Barely a half-inch! MIL's size estimate must've included the antennae. I was relieved. At least, I was until MIL expressed concern that it was a baby roach and there was a nest, as I'd feared.

So I put out some bait traps, just in case, but six sticky traps have been down there for about a week now and I have not caught anything except laundry lint and Poindexter, who stepped in a sticky trap once. He escaped, however, so Geezer is the only one there. He's just dead, half-covered with sticky stuff. Poindexter says, "He's like an dinosaur in a tar pit!"

Tonight or tomorrow we're going to cook cajun chicken, which contains about ten large cloves of minced sauteed garlic, so we'll see if we draw any more little visitors. The ones in the apartment seemed to appear after we cooked with garlic. Ugh.

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