I’m used to roommates. My sister and I shared a room for years, then I lived with a couple of girls in college. I considered finding a roommate for living on my own after college, too, but it worked out that I didn’t need to. (It would have been very difficult, anyway.)
So here I am, happily living in my own apartment without a roommate for the first time in… well I don’t know how long. And then someone decides to move in.
A few someones, actually. At least, they started out as only two or three. Now there must be fifteen or twenty.
I think the banana peels started it. I love bananas, so I went through my bunch in maybe five days (had to be at least five on the bunch). I thought my kitchen trash can, with its reliable WalMart bag covered by its fancy little foot-lever lid, would be able to keep the banana peels out of sight (and smell) until trash day.
I couldn’t smell the bananas, so I was happy. Until I found out someone else could. They took up residence in the trash can, so I opened it one time and out they flew! The tiny little nuisances that I can’t even swat, because they can zip right through the slats in the swatter.
Still, they mostly kept to their quarters in the banana peels in the basket (on the floor in the kitchen in the apartment on the road in the town in the county… you get the idea). Trash day came and went, and the banana peels were long gone. I think they were replaced by bits of lettuce that had started dying in my fridge. (Single people don’t eat enough lettuce to get through an entire head, apparently. At least not this single person. I’m not that silly of a health nut.)
When I emptied the trash, I was careful to take the kitchen trash can outside so any escaping foes would escape to the wide, wide world where my friendly spiders could feast. I even rinsed out the bottom of the trash can, protected though it was by the WalMart bag, because a family had taken up residence along the bottom. They were probably killed in the eviction.
The house was rid of them!
I thought.
I saw a few above the kitchen sink.
Maybe not…
And today there were thirteen lining the edge of the wall above the cabinets. No, I did not count them, but I am a reporter and thus I am practicing my instant-head-count-guesstimate skills. The swatter came out and my neighbor above probably worried I was shooting off a pellet gun or something, by the snap sounds constantly emitting from the kitchen.
Sounds emitted to no avail. I came home tonight, after a particularly strange set of hours at work, and found a number of the foes partying on the corner of the wall and above the cabinets again. Swap! Swap! I killed a few, but many more escaped, in whatever cunning little fashion they could.
These roommates are the worst I’ve ever had. I might have to hire an assassin.
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P.S. I have a separate plastic pail with a snap lid for garbage and keep it under my sink. When it's full or too "smelly", we put it in a black trash can on the south side of the house, where it (and weeds and other garbage) cooks into a lovely black slurry, which Norm dumps on our fruit trees periodically! Wouldn't your neighbors love it if you started that??????