Popping my blog cherry, a.k.a. the roach wars

So, in my usual fashion, I catch on to technology years after everyone else, only now finally taking the blogospere plunge. I didn't even get a cell phone until 2004, so it's no surprise that I'm only now exploring the totally narcisisstic, self indulgent medium that is blogging. And what, you may ask, finally compelled me to divulge my innermost rants and raves to the masses? Was it the premature birth of my third child? The trauma of almost bleeding to death at 27? The psychologically and emotionally draining rollercoaster ride of having my son in the NICU for 6 weeks? The latest ignorant bile to pour from Sarah Palin's mouth? No, my friends, it's cockroaches. Yes, the dirty, invasive, nervous breakdown inspiring scourge from the depths of hell has set up shop in our condo after four years of bug free living. Just in time for our move to a new, larger place. Nothing quite adds to the stress of a move like the specter of possibly having one of these little bastards hitchhiking a ride to our new place. The question of what brought this pestilence upon us looms large in my mind. We're clean folks, despite the presence of a toddler and a 32 year old man. We lived here without seeing so much as an ant for four years, with the exception of the occasional lost cricket. And then, at the peak of the most stressful summer of my life, they appeared. Just one or two at first, but I knew what it meant. When you see one or two of the little f@*kers, you know there are at least 30,000 more hiding in your walls. I'd been down the german cockroach path before. Fearing for my kids and pets, I called some hippy-dippy green exterminator to come spray. We had this guy come out 3 times, and thought we had nipped the problem in the bud. Then right when I began packing for the new place, they returned with a vengence. They popped up in my kid's art box, under my bathroom scale, even on my daughters chest of drawers. We were clearly under siege. When I sounded the alarm to my husband, he laughed at my "melodrama". Laughed until one of the vile invaders accosted him while he was taking a leak. Sufficiently creeped out, he agreed to catch my back on launching a full scale war against the plague, lest they should follow us to our pretty new abode. We started by unpacking anything we had packed in cardboard, and blowing a cool $200 bucks of my maternity leave savings on plastic tubs to repack everything in. Cockroaches LOVE the cardboard, so that shite had to go. We then called the non-hippy cockroach slayers at Terminix to come unleash a holocaust at our place the week before we move. Debit another $130 bucks from my savings. War is not cheap. The holocaust took place yesterday, and so far, no sightings, though I still creep around my own home in fear of spotting a racing, scuttling brown spot from the corner of my eye. Sometimes they move so fast and covertly, you question yourself and suspect the delirium and fear is causing you to hallucinate, only to find that, alas, there is a roach perilously perched at the edge of your toaster oven. As a result of the infestation, I have decided to discard both my microwave and toaster oven, as appparently they like to set up shop in appliances. I fear this will severly limit our ability to sell this place when we put it on the market at the end of the month, but I would rather spend the next seven years with a foreclosure on my credit report than another week of living in fear here.