Crickets and Air Conditioners

Francisco and I finally got around to taking out our window-unit air conditioners to stave off the chilly mornings for a bit longer and so that we don't have to turn on the heat yet (I've been a huge fan of using the heat in the past, but I've never had to pay for it until now).

What happens when you have two-type A firstborns married to each other is that each gets an idea in their head and charges ahead with it, worrying less about whether or not the other is on board. Well, one of us determined that we would get the window and instructed the other to hold on to the air conditioner. Well, the window got pushed up, and then, boom, the air conditioner fell out of the window onto the ground below. Thankfully, we started with the first-floor air conditioner, and not the one on the second floor. We sheepishly pushed our way through the bamboo next to our house to retrieve the air conditioner. (It still works!)

Then, we took it downstairs to the basement.

The thing to tell you about our basement is that crickets live down there. We've known this for some time--it bothers Francisco, who wants to get rid of the crickets. It never really bothered me, I just stepped around them. They've always been small and haven't seemed like a big deal. I mean, you could try to kill them, but the fact is that there is plenty of sunshine coming in around the storm door, so I don't think that killing them would help much; more would just come in.

Well, today it was a bit like a nightmare: we put the air conditioner in its place in the basement and glanced up to the wall near the storm door, and there was something really big. And then there were more. The wall was swarming with them, and they were humongous. And then they began to move a little. It felt like I was shrinking, and they were growing and multiplying. They seemed like some giant, mutant, spider-grasshopper hybrid. Francisco and I were holding onto each other (okay, okay, I was holding onto Francisco).

Francisco returned bravely to spray them. Now he's going downstairs with boric acid.