The Lazarus Roach

As I entered the bathroom to give Buddy a bath yesterday, I was greeted by the site of this, icky bug, triumphantly crawling out of the bathtub's drain.

So far, I've been blessed in this house when it comes to roaches or rather, the lack thereof. In the two and a half years that we've lived here, I've only come across less than a dozen in total. Most of the time, they waltz in through one of the downstairs bathrooms and don't make it into the house much further than that before they're....eliminated.

This is a far cry from the "old neighborhood" where roaches were walking in under the door from outside with impunity, as if they'd been invited for tea. Thank God my cats were roach detectors back in those days. They're worthless when it came to killing them, they're too well fed for that messy business, but at least they stared unflinchingly for several minutes at a time which told me, there's a creepy crawly in the house. Just to make sure you understand the scale of these bugs, this one was at least as long as my pinkie finger.

So there I am, a naked Buddy in one hand and the spray hose in the other. I set Buddy down to pick up the toilet brush, the only thing I'm not worried about messing up with roach guts, and start bashing the roach back down the drain as it's trying to emerge. I combined beating it with spraying it until it gave up clinging to the sides of the drain and washed down the two floors to the sewer pipes below. Just to make sure it wasn't clinging, I made sure to flush down plenty of water during Buddy's bath then later when I took a shower.

Bath-time comes again in our home, always around Isha prayer when I'm getting the kids ready for bed. Again, I enter the bathroom and turn on the light and there, in a triumphantly brazen pose, is that damned roach. There's no way it could be a different one considering this is the first roach in all these years to express an obsession with my second floor bedroom's bathtub. My bathtub is this roach's Mt. Everest. It had to climb up two floors of pipes to make it all the way up to my room, no wonder it wasn't worried about scattering after I'd turned on the light, it had lived a full life...it made it to the bathtub.

Armed with a camera and a shoe, I made sure to capture this roach's accomplishment for posterity before bashing it repeatedly to death. Since these roach's are so big, just one smack, or even two, can't do the job.

Crrrrunch.....Fluuuuuush......try coming back after that beeeeyach!