Teenaged

Yesterday marked the conclusion of a neat family reunion on my mother's side of the family. This year, the reunion was held at a lovely campground currently owned by our church. There were cabins, each holding a handful of people in one room, and many more in the adjacent room.

One cabin was set aside for all the teenaged cousins. They're a rather large, tight-knit group, with a few boys and an quite a few more girls. They bedded the boys in the inner room, and the girls stayed in the outer room with my grandmother and my mother's oldest sister, Linda.

On a whiteboard on the wall, someone claimed the territory by marking the words:
The Teen - & - Aged Cabin.

Fluffy the Cockroach

The beginnings of a deep sleep were beginning to swirl around in my head when I heard a squeal from Delores down the hall. I don't know how, but in an instant I was at her side anxiously rasping "What, what? Are you OK?"

And then I saw him: a cockroach about the size of a small mouse. We had left a door open in the house for about an hour, cooling the apartment down, and this scurrying little critter must have darted in during that time.

Delores urged me to kill him, and I looked about frantically for something sturdy and flat that would do the trick, being barefoot and uninterested in grimy cockroach guts all over my feet. Not wanting to startle the critter and drive him off before I got a good shot in, I grabbed the first sturdy squarish object in sight: a tall box of fireworks.

Without a thought, I brought the edge of the box of fireworks squarely on the back of our visitor. He darted away with the speed of a mouse! Now I was startled and I brought the box of fireworks down again. Crack! The critter paused only a moment, and then darted for the safety of the tangle of computer cords near our desk.

"Oh, no you don't!"

Finally recognizing the danger of trying to exterminate cockroaches with a box of unspent fireworks, I grabbed the next best thing I could reach: the power strip next to the computer. Thwak! No good. He was gone behind the hutch now.

Ohhh! That was it! I found the can of RAID and I hunted that cockroach down within an inch of his life. There wasn't a corner of the house untouched. I silently and wearily dared the critter to bare its cockroachish little face.

In the morning, he was there on the floor, not two feet from where he was originally sighted, lying on his back twitching weakly. With smug victory on my face, I walked him to the toilet where he could wash off. It was back to the sewer for our Brigham City sewer cockroach, and a day of glorious victory for the Keith.

I told Delores, and I called him Fluffy, which Delores observed probably stemmed from Harry Potter; Fluffy was Rubeus Hagrid's three-headed hellhound. I guess if it had been a big dog, the box of fireworks might have come in more handy, eh?