Cockroach December 13, 2007
I got a wee bit of a start to see a cockroach scuttling under the dryer as I went to put the cats in the laundry last night. I’m aware that Melbourne has experienced something of a cockroach plague in the last couple of years, but this was the first one I’ve seen in our house.
Even though I know that the Melbourne cockroaches are natives and not the nasty, dirty little buggers found elsewhere, the sight made me feel a bit icky. Mark obliged by aiming a can of flyspray under the dryer to dispatch the critter, but I still felt uncomfortable and I think that led to me having difficulty getting to sleep. I couldn’t help making plans to pull the dryer and washing machine out and scrub the laundry down before coating the place in insecticide.
Sitting up for a while cheating at Scrabble against strangers was so calming that I ended up sleeping until about 10.30 this morning, leaving Mark to wrangle the munchkins off to childcare.
While I was up I did some reading up on cockroaches and it seems the reason we haven’t seen them sooner is our chook. She is one of their main predators. I must have a word to her about pulling up her figurative socks - where there’s one cocky there may be more.
eeee cockroaches…
The last one i saw was on the back porch. I had to tell it to wait there while i went to get my thong to dispatch it to cockroach hell. I believe the thong is the traditional weapon for dispatching cockroaches in australia. Unless of course the bugger is under the dryer, in which case it’s difficult to get a good swing happening.