Cricket Season

Reading Livingdeb's post about her & RB's adventurous walk the other night (which reminded me of the setting of an Infocom game from her description) made me think of a recent cricket close-call Robert and I had. Because, all Warner Brothers cartoon debate to the side, it is cricket season in Austin again.

A couple days ago, we had a cricket in our dining room, sawing away loudly. I'm not a fan of insects in general (heh, to put it mildly) but I've sort of reached a point of desensitization as far as crickets are concerned - after the Wall Bleeding Crickets and Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Sleep, Crickets Attack situation at my old apartment, it takes a lot of cricket to make me truly crazy. And although the sound is annoying in many contexts - like, for instance, in your dining room while you are having breakfast - I am not disturbed by hearing crickets as I fall asleep. Robert can't stand the sound of crickets at all, though. (I wonder if my growing up someplace where you often keep the windows open at night in the summer has given me both the familiarity and pleasant associations that Robert, growing up in All A/C All Summer Long country, lacks.)

The cricket sound was coming from the direction of the bookcase behind where Robert sits at the table, which posed a dilemma - was it worth his time to try to get back behind this bulging bookcase to find the noisy guy or do we let it go? Robert had already checked out other stuff on the floor over there - the trash can, my conference bag-turned-medication-bottle-holder, and so on. We had basically decided to leave it there after experimentation demonstrated that the sound did not carry to other parts of the house - e.g. my bedroom where my desk and math stuff is set up. Then I picked up the conference bag and put it on my lap to look for some pills. Oddly, I then started hearing the cricket from the other side of me, toward the direction of Robert's desk.

"Um, Robert..."

"Shit, it's on your bag."

"AAAAAAAACK!!!!" I throw the bag away from me quickly, tearing the cricket loose of the outside of the bag in the process, but not interrupting its incessant call for a mate. (OK, perhaps I'm still a bit squeamish about crickets when they are almost touching me.)

Robert grabs the cricket and flushes it down the toilet, letting it continue looking for love in all the wrong places.

This experience really brought back to me how bad my old apartment was before Robert stuffed some kind of gunk from Home Depot in all the crevices where the crickets used to enter. I can't believe I was able to keep any shred of sanity when I would come home from work and smash crickets on my living room wall with a broom for literally hours. And in the parking lot, anywhere there was light, roiling, seething masses of crickets awaited. Ugh.