Ewwwwwww!

Our love affair with our treetop mansion has officially ended. Some of you probably assumed this had already happened much, much earlier - like when we didn't have machines in which to do our laundry for three weeks, or when a large truck showed up unexpectedly and nearly dumped two tons worth of gravel behind our car (which would have left us car-less, 'cuz our little Honda Civic doesn't do off-roadin'), or each weekend when we hear our slumlords arrive home at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday mornings. No, none of these slight annoyances rattled our affection for our little love nest.

Until this morning.

Setting the stage: It's 5:15 a.m. Thursday morning. I stumble into the kitchen to make breakfast. Bleary-eyed, I reach toward the floor to plug in the power cord for the space heater. Instead, I nearly pick up a gigantic cockroach.

Yes, a cockroach.

Immediately I gasp, "Oh my god!" and instinctively back away, hurriedly. (I would have screamed louder, but I didn't want to wake the neighbors. It is 5:15 in the morning, after all. Which, looking back now, is funny: Even in duress, I still try to be polite.)

Hearing the terror in my voice, Lucky asked from the bedroom, "What's wrong?"

"Get a shoe please," I commanded. "There's an enormous cockroach in the kitchen!"

Now normally we subscribe to the "no-kill" Buddhist stream of thought. All living things deserve to exist, regardless of their species. A bug in our apartment doesn't get to live inside with us, but our home is not a murderous den.

We shoo ladybugs outside. We coerce spiders out the door.

Unfortunately, though, word must've gotten out in the bug world about our no-kill policy. The ladybugs told the gnats, the gnats told the little spiders, the little spiders told the bigger spiders, and apparently, the bigger spiders told the cockroaches.

Cockroaches??? Well, we discovered this morning we draw the line at cockroaches.

So Lucky grabbed her heaviest, thickest soled shoe. She dove for the cockroach and missed.

It scampered off, running for its life.

Thankfully on her second lunge, Lucky managed to squash the roach. She then proceeded to pound her shoe into its carcass, again and again.

"Die, die, die!" she screamed madly. (Just kidding. That part is embellished. But it makes for a good story, right?)

She forcefully slammed her shoe into the floor repeatedly, but she did so as quietly as possible. (She is also polite in spite of duress.)

So we discovered something new about ourselves this morning. We will not tolerate cockroaches in our apartment. They need to get out. Now. Or they need to die, by any means necessary. We also discovered another thing we miss about living in the Pacific Northwest - no cockroaches.

We will be calling our slumlords today and asking them (politely, of course) to rid our little abode of any creepy, crawly, nasty cockroaches.

Thus, the end of our love nest love affair.

So this is what it's like living in the South.