Posted By: Legend
How to get rid of cockroaches? - 08/06/14 02:37 AM
Sunday evening... a nice, quiet evening in Casa Legend. I was reading A dance with Dragons*, in my Kindle reader. My wife was buying stuff on Taobao with her iPad. Daughter sleeping in her room.
Suddenly, I heard footsteps. Coming from the wall. A shadow fell over my book! I looked up... and there it was... a cockroach. Body, more than two centimeters. Eyes, beady and hungry.
Not willing to destroy the wall by leaving it splattered with blood and entrails, I grabbed the vacuum cleaner from the supplies room (yes, my Chinese wife knows and understands the joke, and even told it once in English class) and chased it across the wall, until it was sucked away, never to be seen again.
Later that evening, it's slightly smaller brother (or sister?) looked at me from behind the toilet bowl when I was emptying my bladder. And yesterday, yet another one scurried across the floor and disappeared under a cupboard.
The problem is clear. Either they leave, or they will be killed. But how best to get rid of them? And, in a eco-friendly matter - not only because I respect nature (with the exception of cockroaches and mosquitos) but also because I have a very curious one-year old daughter crawling around the apartment, who will put everthing she finds in her mouth as one-year-olds are known to do. So open patches of poison are out of the question.
The apartment itself is clean (to a Dutch standard!) and there is no food left in the open.
* A great series of books, GRRM's Song Of Ice And Fire, but it gets a bit tiresome that even in the narrative he always uses archaic words when it's not necessary. "The Wildlings are outside", Mr GRRM. Not, "The Wildlings are without". A babe is a good-looking young, yet of legal age, lady. And "four-and-twenty" is correct in Dutch, but in English it's "twenty-four".
Suddenly, I heard footsteps. Coming from the wall. A shadow fell over my book! I looked up... and there it was... a cockroach. Body, more than two centimeters. Eyes, beady and hungry.
Not willing to destroy the wall by leaving it splattered with blood and entrails, I grabbed the vacuum cleaner from the supplies room (yes, my Chinese wife knows and understands the joke, and even told it once in English class) and chased it across the wall, until it was sucked away, never to be seen again.
Later that evening, it's slightly smaller brother (or sister?) looked at me from behind the toilet bowl when I was emptying my bladder. And yesterday, yet another one scurried across the floor and disappeared under a cupboard.
The problem is clear. Either they leave, or they will be killed. But how best to get rid of them? And, in a eco-friendly matter - not only because I respect nature (with the exception of cockroaches and mosquitos) but also because I have a very curious one-year old daughter crawling around the apartment, who will put everthing she finds in her mouth as one-year-olds are known to do. So open patches of poison are out of the question.
The apartment itself is clean (to a Dutch standard!) and there is no food left in the open.
* A great series of books, GRRM's Song Of Ice And Fire, but it gets a bit tiresome that even in the narrative he always uses archaic words when it's not necessary. "The Wildlings are outside", Mr GRRM. Not, "The Wildlings are without". A babe is a good-looking young, yet of legal age, lady. And "four-and-twenty" is correct in Dutch, but in English it's "twenty-four".