Tuesday, March 17,2002

I ususally send a story to my students every week for the substitue to read to them. I thought you might like this one.

A Good Cockroach Story

The hot pads that you put under hot dishes are made out of grass here. They are woven together very tightly. We have six of these that we use all the time. We have to hit them on the wall or counter before we use them because cockroaches can crawl into them and hide. When the roaches fall out we step on them or do a quick step dance to get as many as we can.

Well we finally moved into our new building last Friday and we were very careful not to bring any roaches with us. We banged those hot pad holders well and brought them along. Last night at dinner when we had three guests a roach stuck his head out of one of the holders but did not come out. When a roach does get on the table everyone grabs dishes and lifts them up while one student tries to kill it. A student saw this roach but did not want to be rude and did not want our guests to have to grab plates. The student kept an eye on the holder just in case the roach did crawl out. The roach started out many times during the meal but never came out all the way.

While we were cleaning up the student placed all the grass hot pads on the floor and sprayed them with Raid. After about 20 minutes I picked them up and banged them on the wall to make sure no other roaches were hiding. As I banged out fell about 20-30 dead baby roaches. It was so gross. We sprayed the holders again and then put them in the freezer. We will be putting these in the freezer for 24 hours every week just in case.

We learned if we buy anything here that is woven or made of wood we need to put the items in the freezer of 24 hours before we come home to make sure we are not carrying any critters home with us.

One night while we lived in the other house I went into the kitchen at night and flicked on the light and it looked like the whole counter was moving as a wave of roaches ran for cover. I almost gagged. From then on we left the light on in the kitchen until we went to bed and I never walked into a dark kitchen again.