Saturday, August 8, 2009

We Have a Cricket in Our Cave

The other night my husband returned from spelunking in the basement and informed me that there was a hideous cricket of monstrous size hanging around down there. Given his proclivity toward telling tales that aren’t so much lies as they are pretty darn tall and his intense exaggerations, I smiled and nodded with raised and knowing eyebrows during most of his description.

“…and it has leopard spots, and it can jump really far, it’s huge!…”

“Its back legs have knees!”

“It attacked me!”

Sure. Right. A Cave Cricket with leopard spots that’s as big as a small dog; and right in our basement too. Uh-huh.

Nonetheless, I felt a little cautious as I did the laundry downstairs in its lair. Bugs of Unusual Size seem to be frequenting the underground bottom level of our home. The previous week I had slain a rather large black spider with a gallon bucket of bleach as my only weapon: turns out that a gallon of bleach is a heavy and effective tool for squashing the life out of unwelcome arachnids.

It certainly did not help me feel any better about the cricket of much largeness when a few days later my Dad started telling me about a fellow he works with whose shed is suffering from an infestation of Cave Crickets.

“They’re big and move really fast. They prefer to hide, but when they feel threatened one of their defense mechanisms is to jump at you. And supposedly they have teal blood.”

Nice. So not only did I have some freaky monster hiding out in my basement, I also felt badly about basically telling my husband that he needed to get a grip on his fantastical imagination. I’m afraid that my disbelief may come back to haunt me in the form of a Cave Cricket attacking me and sucking my face off.

*For more fun tales involving my super-silly husband click on "the husband" label below.
*To see a real live picture of the scary monster described in this story click here.

5 comments:

Rach said...

Faith! We have them tooo! A lot of them! Every once and a while one makes its way upstairs and out cat will get it. I know this because I will wake up to a bunch of ginourmous crickets parts scattered about my living room. They jump REALLY high. I actually thought it was a HUGE spider at first, and then Noah educated me as to the fact that it was a huge cricket which had just been squished under his shoe. Apparently there is a lot of them in this coal room type situation that we have in the basement. Sick. I will not go downstairs anymore, for this very reason!

Bethany Streng said...

i made the mistake of clicking on that link. thanks for that. i may freak out now.

Faith said...

Yeah, I'm overcome with great fear every time I need to go down and do laundry. I don't like things that lurk and that I can't see.

Faith said...

And Bethany, that would be why I put a link in instead of an actual picture... :)

fawndear said...

That's one evil cricket. Gives me shudders just thinking about it. Thank you for making me thankful that we've no monster crickets in our forest. Only itty-bitty black ones.

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