Not So Jiminy

Yesterday my mother-in-law brought me a grocery bag full of fresh basil. I was making fried zucchini spaghetti for dinner (one of the five meals I have cooked during this pregnancy), and my mother-in-law, unlike myself, has successfully mastered the art of growing herbs. As I washed and chopped the basil, I had to laugh because there were a bunch of green grasshopper-y bugs all over the leaves, and they ended up hopping freely around my kitchen.

Pesky, yes, but not nearly as creepy as the gazillion earwigs I'd found in my basement the day before.

I opened the kitchen windows and the back door and hoped they would find their way outside.

For the last several nights, our house has been ridiculously hot. I've been leaving the swamp cooler on into the wee hours of the morning so I can sleep without sticking to my sheets. I crack the window a bit to draw the cool air into my bedroom, and I pay the price for coolness as the motor hums, and I hear the sounds of the unruly youth roaming the streets outside.

This morning, around 4:00, I got up and turned the swamp cooler off and shut the window, hoping to catch a couple hours of silent slumber. When I got back in bed, I heard a loud, rhythmic chirp! chirp! and came to the sudden realization that those green, grasshopper-y bugs my mother-in-law delivered to me inside the bag of basil were CRICKETS!!!

I'd never seen a cricket before, so I had no idea that's what I was dealing with when they hopped out of the bag. I imagined the creatures to be of the silent variety. As I laid in bed with the chirp! chirp! traveling up the stairwell and straight into my ears, I tried to play it cool. After all, crickets are soothing.

Scotty woke up and tried shutting the window tighter, thinking that the crickets were outside and that I hadn't shut the window all the way. I informed him that the noise was coming from inside the house. He didn't believe me at first, but after laying back down, he agreed, "Yes, they're in our house!"

About two minutes later, I was about to snap. The soothing sound of the crickets in our house was SO.NOT.SOOTHING. It was loud and obnoxious! And oh, so consistent! Even the cat was starting to get irate!

Scotty could tell by my anxious breathing that something needed to be done, so he ended up creeping down the stairs to see if he could find a cricket or two. The second he stepped foot on the first step, they shut right up.

Sneaky, those crickets are!

Scotty came right back proclaiming, "We will never find them!"

So once again, I laid in bed trying to be "soothed" by the sound of the crickets as they resumed their chirp! chirp! Naturally, I thought of Jiminy Cricket and wondered why Gepetto hadn't murdered him.

Because I was gonna kill me some crickets!

Fortunately, the torture was short-lived. Not much can draw our cat out of his lazy night-time slumber, but he eventually got fed up and went marching down the stairs with his old man cat attitude.

I don't know what happened down there, but I didn't hear anymore crickets.

Kudos, Colonel. Kudos.