I get up slowly from the loveseat — slowly so I won’t scare the thing away; ever notice how good their peripheral senses are? — to get a shoe. I choose my black boot since it has a nice big heel and enough flat tread to effectively smoosh.

I sneak up, take aim, and BAM! The heel hitting the wall sounds like a gunshot.

Now all this happened fairly quickly, so let’s set up the sequence again.

Centipede crawls out and stops. I slowly get up, pick up a boot, sneak back, and bam! When the boot  falls away, I see:

IT EXPLODED!

And I laugh hysterically. So hard that I cough.

And my cat is hiding behind the dining room table because the gunshot out of nowhere must have scared his whiskers white.

And I laugh some more. Not at the cat, at the exploded centipede. I’m grossed out, but I’m still laughing.

I did find the body, by the way. It was a limp worm about 2 feet from the wall. Gross.

But really funny.

Okay, now back to your regularly scheduled day.

*snicker*

This bumble bee was hovering near some shrubs at the top of the steps leading down from the visitor center. He stood out, partly because of his size and partly because of his shiny butt. He would hover a couple of seconds, move slightly, hover again, zoom away, and come back. A couple of times another bee swooped in and they had a little buzz fight, which usually meant dive-bombing past me where I sat trying to take the perfect photograph.

I’ve learned that bumble bees are very hard to photograph. I think I did okay for my first try, though. The bee was 10-15 feet away when I took these.

Mr. Bee was still hovering in the area when I returned to the center, 2 1/2 hours later.

So I blew him instead. So within one second of opening my door, I’m standing there huffing and puffing to get this dragonfly out of my face.

I know I was looking at him cross-eyed, because he was just a blur in front of my nose. He backed off, and suddenly settled on my arm, which was still stretched out with my hand on the door handle. I watched him twitch his wings lower and lower, the way dragonflies do when they sit down to bask.

I let go of the door and sank to my knees to set the grocery bags down, hoping to get my cell phone out to take a photo.

But he was too quick, and suddenly took off again. He kind of bumped up against the siding a few times, looking for something to land on. I stood there with my arm out for a couple of seconds. I wonder what the neighbors thought — I probably looked like either I was suddenly feeling theatrical, or I was calling a falcon back to my wrist.

Well anyway. It didn’t take long and he flew away completely. This all happened in about one minute.

While he was on my arm, I got a good close look at the little “combs” on his feet, and at his iridescent eyes. His body was dark grey, I think, and there were was a brown spot and black spot on each wing. Kinda like the photo at right, but without the white spots and a thinner body.

I’m used to fat blue and green dragonflies around here, but he was smaller. I know he wasn’t a damselfly, though. Damselflies fold their wings back, but dragonflies spread them out to the sides.

Anyway, it was really cool.

I’ve realized that bugs make me swear. Not all bugs, just creepy ones. Roaches in particular, and some spiders. And centipedes, but those were more of a problem up north than they are here.

So here I am swearing in my kitchen at this roach, and when I scare it out from behind a box, I see that it’s red. I’ve never had that kind before, although I’m told they’re common here. I’ve always thought roaches were brown-ish, but maybe those are “water bugs.” That’s the kind that invaded my dorm room my last year of college (the dorm was across the street from the water, of course).

I manage to partially squish the roach with the nearest thing at hand that will let me jab at it from a distance — a dowel rod. It limps away along the moulding where the cabinets meet the floor. That’s when I realize that the moulding is not flush against the cabinets, it has a quarter-inch gap where the roach crawls in to hide.

I don’t have any roach spray (yet), so I grab the Tilex shower cleaner. I figure that since bugs breath through their bodies, all I have to do is smother it in a nasty chemical, and the Tilex is potent. I spray and spray. The roach makes a brief struggle and then falls behind the moulding and never comes out again.

I win! Sort of. The corpse is probably still in the moulding. I was too creeped out to go back and try to get it out. And they say that when you see one, there are more lurking in dark palces that you never see. Blech.

So I have a new project now: caulk the moulding around the cabinets. No, the roach probably didn’t get in from under the cabinets, but it will certainly make me feel better, and I can seal away that roach from last night in a tomb of goo. The cabinets also have a gap where they meet the wall, and lots of little crawlies could potentially hide in there.

*shiver* And here I thought that the spiders were going to be the bug of choice in my new place. Nasty black spiders, the kind that are just big enough to be creepy, very quick on the run, and very flexible — they curl up when you try to squish them, and they seem to escape the worst of the blow and run away. Squishy, fast, and creepy: not a good combination!

 I’d almost reather deal with the silverfish from my last place. At least those were only squishy and fast, and not so creepy. Besides, my cat liked to catch and eat them.