Dear George,
So far 2026 has been mostly trouble at our house. We’ve endured a major winter storm, the death of our beloved dog Iko, my computer crashing and needing replacement, a fender-bender with our CR-V, getting closed out of my poetry class during registration, and Katja’s upcoming surgery. The worst, though, has been our ongoing battle with the cockroaches. They appeared in our kitchen about five or six months ago. For a long time we didn’t do anything about them. I thought of them as tiny little pets who would visit us in the night and play around on the kitchen counter. Then one day our fancy and expensive stove stopped working. The technician came, took it apart, and concluded that the cockroaches had destroyed the electrical system. He shoveled the corpses into a wastebasket and said that the stove would have to be replaced. That was the end of my amusement. I asked Gemini who the best exterminator in town was, and we made an appointment.
While waiting for the exterminator, I did some investigation. It turns out that cockroaches have been around for about 320 million years. They are among the most adaptable insects, found from the Arctic to the tropics. German cockroaches, the species in our household, are social creatures, capable of transmitting information, recognizing kin, and residing in a common shelter. They eat human food, pet food, garbage, book bindings, soap and toothpaste, paper, cardboard, and fecal matter. Highly dependent on water, they are often found in kitchens and bathrooms. Females carry egg cases which hold about 30 to 40 long, thin eggs. With a life span up to a year, a single female can produce 300 to 400 offspring. Cockroaches are among the hardiest insects. Some can go for a month without food and without air for 45 minutes. Decapitated cockroaches remain active, and the decapitated head can wave its antenna for several hours.
The exterminator’s pre-visit instructions asked that we remove everything from the kitchen and bathrooms. This was no easy matter since we have been accumulating “stuff” for the last half century. Our kitchen has 42 shelves and 5 drawers. All of them were filled to capacity with boxed and canned food, kitchen utensils, dinnerware, glassware, cleaning supplies, and miscellany. I made five or six trips to the nearby drugstore dumpster and brought home 3 or 4 dozen cardboard boxes. We worked full-time for two days to fill the boxes and move them into the dining room. We could barely move around the dining room once we’d finished. The exterminator came and concluded that we were pretty heavily infested. We signed a contract for six visits over a 12-week period. In fact, he completed his ninth visit last week. Each time the exterminator sprayed and put gel bait in crevices and niches. He put little roach traps all around the kitchen each time, and we could tell how successful the treatment had been. After the first visit there might have been 8 to 10 dead roaches in each trap. Now only 2 or 3 traps have a single dead roach.
Close to the end, my sense is that the exterminators are going to continue till it’s down to zero. Since the end is in sight, we decided to move our belonging back into the kitchen. Because this involves decisions about rearranging things, it’s taking a lot longer to move back in than it took to move out. We started six days ago, working about four to six hours a day, and we still have a day’s worth left to move. Katja has woken up every morning with an aching back and legs, and I struggle to get out of bed. It is very satisfying though. Because we moved all the remaining boxes out to the foyer, our dining room looks more beautiful than we remember it. The kitchen shelves look back to normal too. Katja says we’re never going to do this again. I agree. All we have to do is keep these unpleasant pests from returning.
Love, Dave
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