A Window Into My Home, Part 5
I am blind. My glasses are extremely thick, which makes my contact lens prescription a special order. When I take the spectacles off in order to shower, I am usually doing so first thing in the morning. I'm not yet awake enough to stick my finger in my eye to insert a contact lens, but I'm about to get into a small space filled with water drops and steam. In other words, there is a ten minute window of time during the day where I am using no corrective devices for my poor vision.
One other thing to note, for people who are not similarly afflicted: When you can't focus your own eyes, everything appears larger with indistinct borders. An unfocused photo of street lamps at night is a good example. Big round fuzzy balls take the place of small, sharply edged ovals.
When I got into the shower this morning, a brown fuzzy golf ball attacked me. It could have been a tarantula, it could have been a scorpion, it could have been John Ashcroft for all I knew. I levitated out of the tub with a mighty and fearsome squeak. With a pounding heart I slid my glasses onto my snout and peered around the edge of the shower curtain.
There sat a camel cricket. For the breed it was pretty enormous, but we're still talking maybe gumball sized. Maybe. If you count the feelers.
(What happened to black crickets with shiny heads? They're the ones that chirp. They're adorable. Pixar is going to make a movie starring one of them someday. More importantly, they hop straight ahead like reasonable creatures, and you can see them move a little before they jump. They don't just pop into a random direction like BACKWARDS with their nasty spidery legs. They don't walk along walls and ceilings like spiders, but skip along the ground where they can be trapped in jars. I LIKE field crickets. But noooooo, they haven't been the official house bug in two decades. Now it's all horrible ugly nasty non-singing spider cricket hybrids.)
Still feeling the aftereffects of terror, I poked my head out of the bathroom and informed my mate that I had a man task for him. Since he is not deaf, and had heard the squeakthumppause that indicates a bug in the bathtub, he was already coming towards me. Of course, his keen response time meant that I nearly brained him with the door when I opened it to tell him he had a man task.
He has been on bug patrol for so many years now that, as he puts it, he has developed both techniques and strategies for each type of unacceptable home invader. Camel crickets, for example, are too wily to simply whack with a shoe. Also, even if you get a lucky shot, you still have to clean up bug guts.
I stood at a safe distance, while my hero turned on the shower to drench the insect before swooping down with a wad of toilet paper. As he dropped the dazed victim into the toilet, he said with a straight face, "First, you subdue him with the water hoses."
One other thing to note, for people who are not similarly afflicted: When you can't focus your own eyes, everything appears larger with indistinct borders. An unfocused photo of street lamps at night is a good example. Big round fuzzy balls take the place of small, sharply edged ovals.
When I got into the shower this morning, a brown fuzzy golf ball attacked me. It could have been a tarantula, it could have been a scorpion, it could have been John Ashcroft for all I knew. I levitated out of the tub with a mighty and fearsome squeak. With a pounding heart I slid my glasses onto my snout and peered around the edge of the shower curtain.
There sat a camel cricket. For the breed it was pretty enormous, but we're still talking maybe gumball sized. Maybe. If you count the feelers.
(What happened to black crickets with shiny heads? They're the ones that chirp. They're adorable. Pixar is going to make a movie starring one of them someday. More importantly, they hop straight ahead like reasonable creatures, and you can see them move a little before they jump. They don't just pop into a random direction like BACKWARDS with their nasty spidery legs. They don't walk along walls and ceilings like spiders, but skip along the ground where they can be trapped in jars. I LIKE field crickets. But noooooo, they haven't been the official house bug in two decades. Now it's all horrible ugly nasty non-singing spider cricket hybrids.)
Still feeling the aftereffects of terror, I poked my head out of the bathroom and informed my mate that I had a man task for him. Since he is not deaf, and had heard the squeakthumppause that indicates a bug in the bathtub, he was already coming towards me. Of course, his keen response time meant that I nearly brained him with the door when I opened it to tell him he had a man task.
He has been on bug patrol for so many years now that, as he puts it, he has developed both techniques and strategies for each type of unacceptable home invader. Camel crickets, for example, are too wily to simply whack with a shoe. Also, even if you get a lucky shot, you still have to clean up bug guts.
I stood at a safe distance, while my hero turned on the shower to drench the insect before swooping down with a wad of toilet paper. As he dropped the dazed victim into the toilet, he said with a straight face, "First, you subdue him with the water hoses."
posted by Sanya at 10:36 AM
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