The Bug Man

The bug man came by today and did his thing. I have found that it's extremely important here in Florida to have a good bug man. When I lived in Chicago I had a bug man. He wasn’t very good. No matter how often he came to squirt poison around the house we still ended up with stray cockroaches every once in a while. The fact that I thought he was good looking probably is what kept me from cancelling the contract. Besides, Chicago cockroaches, although very hardy, aren't all that big, and if they are kept to a bare minimum they are almost tolerable. I was always told that they hitched a ride on the bags of groceries that I brought home, that's why they were impossible to exterminate. Apparently they are part of the food chain.

The cockroaches we have here in Florida aren't anything like Chicago roaches. For one thing, they don't swarm en masse inside the house. They seem to prefer to live outside, and only seek shelter inside the house at the start of the rainy season. Well, it is now the start of the rainy season, and the cats and I have started to find the Florida version of cockroaches, or as they call them here, Palmetto Bugs, inside the house. These roaches, or Palmetto Bugs, are huge. How huge? How about two inches long huge, and what’s more they fly. These things are so big you can actually hear them skitter across the floor as they run for their lives from Fat Kitty. And the crunch they make when you step on them is only a little less disgusting than the green slime that splatters out of them. That‘s why I was so glad that when I went outside to talk to the bug man, he was already spreading around Palmetto Bug bait to kill the little bastards. That’s going to deprive Fat Kitty of one of her favorite pastimes, but that’s okay, I’ll sleep better at night knowing a gigantic cockroach isn‘t going to be crawling up my nose.