Impressive Disasters

Whenever my husband is deployed, I undertake some sort of large project. One reason for this is to distract myself and stay busy, the other to impress the socks off my husband when he returns. That's right, I can fix toilets. Of course I can paint large areas of the house! You better believe I can take my car and have someone else fix it. The trouble is that I'm not actually a handy person, hence the last boast. However, I always think that with a little work, I could become Bob Vila.

So this deployment, I tackled the bathroom. After we got over eating peanut butter and jelly for an entire week, it seemed fine. Everything was finished except for the windows. I had taken down the mini blinds and ordered some faux wood blinds. They didn't come for two months, but it was still before Willie's arrival. I opened the first box. A small piece of plastic whizzed past my eye. "I hope that isn't important," I thought. It was. The non-returnable, steal-of-the-season blinds I had ordered were all kinds of jacked up. Now, except for some help from little elves, they will never work. I opened the second set of blinds, sure that I had made all my mistakes with the first set. I hadn't. I had measured wrong. Good thing they were such a good price, because that was the cost of yet another Bob Vila lesson.

Everything worked out. I bought some blinds at Lowes and their installation went as smoothly as the butter that Halle sneaks off the counter every time I look away. The only problem now is that the largest cockroach I have ever seen has bumbled into my bathroom.

After living in North Carolina for four years now, I have learned a few things about cockroaches. There are numerous species, the largest one being the Woolly Brown. It comes into houses when there is extreme weather outside, but it can't actually live inside for any length of time. That means that spraying for these things is pointless. They can't infest a house. But they can fly on your face. True story. It happened to me in Georgia. They can also fall out of a cabinet onto your arm and wiggle their antennae at you. That happened last year, and I let out a hearty scream. Willie yelled from across the house, "Was that really necessary?" I informed him that it WAS absolutely necessary. Obviously anything regarding cockroaches requires screaming.

So, since this type of cockroach cannot live in my bathroom, I just have to wait three days before I can vacuum the dead corpse up and use it again. That's the easiest fix I've had to deal with for the past three months.