Crickets (for Character)

Life has changed a lot since my divorce.

For example, I downsized, and now I live in a little cottage house with lots of character.

So many euphemisms. I guess it’s not polite to say I’M BROKE SO I BOUGHT A HOUSE THAT IS ALSO KIND OF BROKE AND BY BROKE I MEAN BROKE-EN GET IT BECAUSE WOW A LOT OF THINGS NEED TO BE FIXED.

So instead I say “I recently downsized to a house with a lot of character."

Part of the character of my house is that the basement is mostly unfinished, and there are a lot of critters in that situation - notably spiders and grasshoppers, which I only really know about because my cat kills them and leaves their little carcasses upside down on the floor.

Because I do have a cat and two dogs and an actual human child, I don’t really love the idea of bug sprays and poisons, so I was exploring other options, which led me to researching glue traps and boy are those controversial (the thought of trapping an animal in a way that makes it choose between losing a limb to escape and slowly starving to death apparently doesn't appeal to much of the Internet, myself included).

So I decided to Google “sticky traps kill by starving the animal” and I don't know what I wanted to find except maybe someone who would tell me “Yeah, but it’s not that bad and you can go ahead and do it anyway."

The Internet did not deliver that result, but it did deliver an article titled “How Glue Traps Ruined my Childhood."

Now unless this was written by a grasshopper child, I don’t see how that could be true, I thought. That’s not even worth reading.

So I read it.

It’s a story about a person who, as a child, awoke one night to hear a struggle that is described as loud and rambunctious enough that they mistook the noise for a human being who had broken into the house. So they went to investigate and found a mouse stuck to a glue trap, thrashing about and trying to free itself. What follows is an account of how they crouched in the yard with dish soap and water, struggling to free the mouse, and getting bitten in the process.

Ahhhhhhh, I thought. So you got a disease from the mouse and you almost died, thus the ruining of the childhood.

No.

The story concludes with this statement: “After my encounter with the mouse who had gotten stuck in our glue trap, I wasn’t able to sleep for several nights without the paranoia that every little sound I heard was made by a small suffering mouse.”

Well. Ruined childhood, indeed! See, I was worried the divorce would ruin my child’s life, but I guess I know what the real culprit will be.

In all seriousness, I do not enjoy the thought of catching a mouse and letting it starve to death. That seems unnecessary and also gross. But I don’t have mice...probably. I have a basement with spiders and crickets and I want a basement with no spiders and no crickets. And as far as I know, they don’t make the snap traps or spin traps for spiders and crickets (those would be so tiny and strange!) and I already ruled out the poison option. I decided to go the glue trap route and hope that no mice or snakes would find their way onto the traps (or into my house at all).

So there I was on Amazon on a Saturday night, browsing glue traps, which is a "Single & 30" moment for sure. Usually, when I shop on Amazon, I really like to look at the photos submitted in the review section and let me tell you DO NOT DO THAT IF YOU ARE BUYING GLUE TRAPS. I HAVE NEVER SEEN SO MANY AGGRESSIVELY DEAD THINGS IN MY LIFE. There were entire snakes stuck to these things. Entire snakes. There were moths and mice and cockroaches and spiders and any number of disgusting things stuck to these traps.

Photo after photo after photo of gross dead stuff and I could.not.look.away. I looked at all of them. There had to have been at least 67 photos of sticky dead things and I looked at them all. (In terms of the efficacy of the review situation the photos were pretty effective: clearly the traps were sticky, and clearly the things stuck to them were dead. Check and check).

So naturally, I bought 30. They were 12.99 and 4.5 stars and I have enough that I could lay them all out flat in rows and trap literal humans if I wanted to, so I’m not likely to ever run out. But it is odd. Who on earth needs thirty of those?

Apparently Amazon didn’t hear that I’m downsizing.