Saturday, October 21, 2006

Buggin' Out

When I was in Pittsburgh, my aunt gave me a big bag of clothes her two year old son had outgrown. Also, my parents had an additional bag of clothes from the same aunt stashed in their basement. When we got back to Atlanta, I threw the lot in the washer. Sam seems to have sensitive skin, and after being stashed in various basements for a few months the clothes had a musty scent. They ran through the wash cycle, and since Dr. SOB was up I asked him to switch them to the dryer. He cleaned the lint trap. By then I had gotten up and he gestured to me to get the lint and throw it away for him. He handed me the lint ball, and then he saw a little something on the lip of the washer. He grabbed it and as he was dropping it into my hand, he squealed, jumped and started shaking his hands. The instant he yelped, I felt a scratchy sensation on my palm. My husband had handed me a roach. It was dead, but it was still a roach. In my hand. Instantaneously, I started waving my arms and screaming, asking him why he would put a roach on me? Why? WHY?!? Then, we froze. The roach was somewhere on the floor. We were fairly sure it was dead, but those little fuckers are crafty. What if it was just playing dead? I ran to the kitchen to secure some weaponry, but luckily it wasn't necessary. Dr. found the carcass and decided he would handle things on his own. He covered everything up with some toilet paper and flushed it away. For the rest of the night, we obsessed over the origin of the offensive insect. For our peace of mind, we decided that it came from one of the bags of baby clothes that had been stored in basements. I turned every article of the hand -me-down clothing inside out and inspected it thoroughly, and everything appeared roach free. But we're sticking with our theory. Otherwise, our skin might shake off from repetitive twitching.

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4 comments:

super des said...

You know my stance on cockroaches. Now I'm going to be freaking out a little whenever I wash clothes. But thank goodness you did wash them!

p.s. I too have sensitive skin, so little Sam and I can hang out and do our scent-free, dye-free, cockroach -free laundry together.

Amy Jo said...

Dr. SOB has sensitive skin, too, but he refuses to do anything about it. He thinks that if he uses lotion, people will smell it on him and make assumptions. Like that he uses lotion.

After we run out of the industrial-sized bottle of dreft someone gave us, we're totally getting the regular dye-free scent-free stuff. I think they quadruple the price on anything with a baby stamped on it.

susan said...

Ewww, eww, eww, eww, ick! Kudos for not immediately declaring that hand "unclean" and chopping it off for fear of it defiling the rest of the body!!

Amy Jo said...

Update: Last night when I was doing laundry, I found a roach leg in the basket. It was bad.