I love spiders, especially the hunters and jumpers. Cute little guys. Well, I'm pretty paranoid about black widows. They have a nasty bite. We had a widow in our bedroom last month, and it took me a whole week to catch the damned thing. It moved way too fast. I guess I could have smooshed it, but I hate to do that to a spider.
Cockroaches get an instant smoosh. I still have vague memories of the country I lived in when I was very small. I remember really BIG cockroaches (well, I was a small kid, so maybe my memories are exaggerated) and some that took to the air (that I didn't imagine). I remember one time seeing one of the really huge ones, so I jumped up on top of the sofa and emitted what can only be described as a girlie scream (are you sure it wasn't a girlie scream, Mulder?). Give me a break, I was maybe four years old. But I really loathe cockroaches and am not too keen on smooshing them because if they're big enough, you can actually hear them squish. That's kind of disgusting.
Slightly amusing cockroach story. One night I was asleep and felt something large and tickly crawling up my thigh. I instinctively scooped it up and tossed it over the side of the bed. Then I woke up (I definitely wasn't awake when I grabbed the mysterious creature). I spent a couple of wakeful hours wondering what the hell it was and whether it was coming back. The next day, I was in the kitchen doing whatever. High on the wall over the bundled up newspapers (we didn't have curbside recycling then, and we hadn't recycled in ages) was a large cockroach, most likely my nocturnal visitor. I was furious. So THIS was the culprit who had disturbed my sleep. I marched into the bedroom, grabbed a shoe, and started wading through the piled-up papers, yelling, "I'm gonna KILL you, you cost me three hours of sleep!" My then-boyfriend very kindly took the shoe from me and killed it for me. I'm not sure why he did that; I was doing fine by myself, and my blood was up.
