Monster Invasion

If you missed the inaugural post on these mutant horrors they insist are crickets, look here.

They're taking over our basement.

I saw the first one in late summer, at night. So I stopped doing laundry after dark.

Now, with winter and daylight savings, they come out before four o'clock in the afternoon, and I've seen more of them than I care to recall.

It's seriously affecting my laundry upkeep.

One of them even ventured into my kitchen last week.

I really don't think of myself as especially squeamish. I'll grab a garden-variety cricket and toss him outside any day of the week. I don't like spiders, but, if there is no masculine personage about to do the job, I am capable of killing them. (Shhh! Don't tell my husband. . .he'll think he doesn't have to spring to my rescue anymore.) Snakes don't bother me, unless they're dangerous ones. Mice may startle me if they suddenly scamper across my floor, but they don't scare me.

But these unholy things are something not meant to be bred, like the undesired outcome of a spider drunkenly mistaking a cricket for its mate. I think they're an evolutionary precursor of the orc. (That was a joke. I don't buy into macro-evolution. And I know orcs are a fantastical creation of the imagination. Though I did try to convince Kevin that, if we ever have a little boy, we could name him something like Oscar Roland Clark and have our very own real, live ORC. But I digress. . . .) They're starting to inhabit my nightmares--which would be common, pleasant dreams if they stayed away--and gazing at them in an effort to rationallly remember their harmlessness and brave the basement floor from the stairs to the dryer sends convulsive shudders down my spine.

It's really quite a problem.