This Post is Disgusting. (And longer than originally intended)

Just a warning.

Have I talked about my Klassy Neighbors? (Okay, I searched old posts, and no, I have not. So, you need some back-story.)

There is a tiny, sad house next door. So tiny and sad, in fact, that when it went up for sale last year (or maybe it was the year before... it all blends together after a while), I joked with BoyWonder that I should just buy it to prevent any terrible neighbor problems. It sold for something ridiculously low, like maybe sixteen or twenty thousand dollars. Low enough that even now that I'm part-time, I probably could have afforded the payment on it, even if I just let it sit empty.

And then, it started happening. First came a family of... I can't even tell you how many people, because it seemed to be a very fluent number. I know at least seven people lived there on a regular basis (this is a tiny, tiny house, too), and there were at least another six or seven who would stay there fairly often. They were loud, terrifying people who looked a little bit inbred.

These people were so bad I started a group on Facebook just to vent about them in a semi-public setting. They had piles of tires and old window air-conditioners in their back yard. Tires piled up against my privacy fence. For months, they had old appliances and bags of trash on their front porch. They worked on their vehicles (loudly, with lots of engine-revving) in the middle of the night... Which I suppose is unavoidable sometimes, and I get that. But my neighborhood is laid out so that their driveway is less than three feet from my house. Often, this revving was happening maybe four feet from my bedroom window.

 Klassy Porch. You could almost have a scavenger hunt here. Sadly, this is after they did some cleaning. 

Klassy Yard. See the tires? The AC units? How about my favorite, the pool ladder? 

I think we were stuck with them for maybe a year. What finally happened was that I attended a neighborhood watch meeting, and I (and several other people who are close to here) complained about their yard, and the city manager showed up at their house to address the situation. They started packing up and were gone that weekend.

Then we find out that whoever bought this lovely home has a giant family who he apparently allows to live in this house rent-free. Awesome.

The next batch of awesome neighbors are teenagers. College-aged teenagers, but still not really better than Klassy Neighbors, version 1.0. Their yard was just as trashy, there was just as much noise, and once, I watched a group of boys shoot targets in their yard... FROM THEIR ROOF. Hello? You live in town. You should not be on your mother effing roof with guns. Ever.

But here's the weird part (and, I promise you, I'm getting to the point soon). These kids don't ever actually move out. They just kind of stop showing up. The house sits empty for a month, or maybe two (again, it all blends together).

And one day, about two months ago, I come home from work and there's a giant semi truck parked in front of my house. Klassy Neighbors v3.0.

They start to move some things from the house and onto a trailer... And leave. Without the trailer. For two weeks.

The next time they come back, they mow their jungle-yard, pull some furniture out of their house for a day, move the furniture back inside, and leave again, for another couple of weeks.

The next time, same thing. Except they moved around a bunch of the junk heaps in their yard, and I can tell the woman is doing a ton of cleaning inside the house (from our utility room, we can see directly into a sliding-glass door of their house). But again, moving furniture outside for a day, and then moving back inside before they leave for another two weeks.


But this time, when they leave, something terrible happens (yes, this is the point of the long rambling).

BoyWonder and I come home from shopping and there are two giant cockroaches on my kitchen wall. In broad daylight.

So I start to panic. I've dealt with roaches before. I know what can happen. It's not good, and roaches are crazy hard to eliminate. But BoyWonder doesn't know. He totally thinks I'm kidding when I start telling him that we need to cut our losses, burn this house down and find somewhere else to live because this house is ruined.

But at this point, he's pretty calm. He seals up some pretty obvious spots where they might be coming in from outside, and he sprays poison on the foundation of the house... Which is when he finds the trail of dead and dying roaches from the Klassy house to ours.

Those motherfuckers.

So, since early July, we've been increasingly vigilant. Our house, which was never filthy to begin with, but could have used some extra love, is hospital clean. You could eat off any surface in our house with no reservations. BoyWonder has been systematically caulking every crack and crevice, which is no small feat, considering our house was built in 1920. We made our own roach bait. We put down sticky traps.

For a while, we felt like we had just about solved the problem. We'd go a week or so without seeing any, and then we'd maybe see one or two.

Turns out, that's not how this works. BoyWonder went outside in the middle of the night to take the trash out, and apparently our yard turns into roach city once it's dark outside. There were, according to him, thousands of roaches all over our yard. On the fence. In the trees. On the ground. And then we started seeing them all over our house.

So, we called an exterminator (which I actually requested in the beginning of this, but BoyWonder is trying to hoard money right now). He's coming today, and I'm thankful we called when we did, because yesterday, BoyWonder woke up and there was a roach staring at him from the nightstand. And I killed two in the bathroom. BoyWonder got up at the same time I did and we ended up killing seven or eight of them in a ten minute span.

Not cool. Not cool at all.

Needless to say, we're both pretty freaked out.

BoyWonder woke himself up in the middle of the night tonight to hunt roaches. (Sadly, I'm not joking. He was already a little bit neurotic, but the roaches have driven him right over the edge and into OCD territory.) I still think we should just burn the house down, but I'll give the exterminator a chance to do his magic.

So, friends, that's what I've got this week. Roaches. Good times.

If you need me, I'll be hanging out in a corner, rocking back and forth, with a flyswatter in my hand.