Cockroaches

We live with a certain number of cockroaches in our house here at the Outpost. (Perhaps no-one will ever visit us again, now that I’ve admitted that openly!) Anyhow, living with those roaches brings many challenges. Cover the food. Beware in the morning if you’ve left dirty dishes out overnight. Check your boots before you put them on each day. Tuck the mosquito net in REALLY tightly around your mattress. My family all knows what it means when they hear me give a certain horrified shriek---that’s just Mom finding out that she put on her pants with a roach in them. No big deal. (The rest of them manage just fine without the shrieking.)

Mind you, it’s not that we share our house willingly. We spray poison, which often seems to harm us more than the cockroaches. Kimberly and cousin Lena have had ‘roach sleepovers’ where the purpose for staying up late was to hunt roaches, armed with flashlight and deadly knife. Of course, the 5 cent bounty we put on each dead roach carcass encouraged such sleepovers.

So, we do try. Flyswatters are placed in strategic locations around the house, so that if any poor roach dares to come out of hiding in the daylight, he will at least be properly scared back into invisibility! At times it seems that our efforts are fruitless. The cockroaches live freely outdoors, and should we be so blessed as to kill every single one in our house one day, I’m convinced that in the night a new horde would move in through all the cracks and crevices in our wooden plank floor and walls.

But recently we’ve found a new challenge in sharing our house with the little beasts. When we returned from furlough last year, Kevin rejoiced in the newly installed electricity and bought a beautiful brand-new laser printer. (I bet you can tell where this is going…) While I’m not blessed with a lot of technological know-how, it’s quite apparent that the laser printer uses heat to stick that black powder on the paper, somehow in the correct form of letters and pictures. (I won’t elaborate further, since that’s the extent of my knowledge, anyhow.) Combine that nice warmth with lots of little hiding places, all nicely packaged in a black plastic case, and presto! You’ve got a recipe for a cockroach’s favorite habitation.

The first time one came through the roller, squashed all over the paper….well, it wasn’t a pretty sight, but we could live with it. I mean, one just gathers all the legs and appendages from everywhere, right onto the paper, and wads the whole thing up straight into the trash can. It was when the copies started coming out with a long blank streak that we got more concerned. It didn’t work very well for literacy classes to have one blank streak down the center of the paper. Hand writing in the missing numbers and letters got old really quickly. So we began the investigation, suspicious that the blame lay with those pesky roaches again. Sure enough, two weeks later, we found the problem—a cockroach’s innards had smeared in exactly the wrong place, across the window where the laser shines down on the roller.  Okay, so once found, we fixed that. Of course, during the extensive investigation, in which we did everything the warranty said not to, we managed to knick a little chip in one of the important rollers, so that now each copy comes out with some little funny black spots on it. Sigh. Well, we can live with the black spots, as long as the blank section is now gone!

And so continues our battle with the little scurrying critters. At this point we feel like we are winning. We’ve poisoned the critters, and we’ve figured out the most important places to clean the smears off. Wait, I smell something…what’s that? Oh dear, there’s a really bad smell coming out of the side of the printer….I hope it’s not melting wires or something. No, not the smell of wires melting, …no, it smells more like, wait, that’s definitely the scent of…yep, you got it. Cockroach on the grill!