The Original Bug Zapper – Insects Beware!!!


 

When I was in college my friend and I were sitting out on her porch doing homework and smoking cigarettes. I leaned forward to stub out my Marlboro light in the ashtray when I felt something slide down my back and into my shorts. My heart stopped beating and I sprang from my seat leaping the few steps to my left into the living room. I grabbed both sides of my shorts and yanked them down around my ankles.

Turns out? It was a bobby pin that had slipped from my hair. We both were crying laughing and I thanked the Lord her dad and brother hadn’t been home. I know without a doubt that the Pope himself could have been there and I still would have dropped my pants faster than you could say Amen. 

A few years later when I was single and living in Tampa I had a one bedroom apartment in an old house built around the turn of the century. The house had 12 foot tall ceilings and had been divided into 3 apartments. The wooden floors were cracked and worn and nothing was properly sealed. I’m pretty sure some of the windows were original to the house.

There was no escaping the bugs. Luckily I had a cat that was pretty good at catching them. But you see the problem with cats is they can be lazy and stubborn and sometimes they don’t care what you want them to do. In fact I’m sure there were times she wouldn’t do what I asked specifically because I had asked her. Kind of like a toddler!

One morning I was headed sleepily to the bathroom and there was a HUGE roach on the floor in the hallway. It was blocking my way to my kitchen and bathroom. It was a small hallway so there was no sneaking by it. I had no doubt that it would sprout wings and fly, as some of them do, and attack me! The worst part is you can never tell which one of those buggers flies! I turned to my weapon of choice and started launching magazines at it. Unfortunately all I had were catalogs, the 20 pound Vogue was in the bathroom next to the tub, so it would just run out from under them and then stop right there in the middle of the floor. I turned to my second favorite weapon and grabbed the broom by the tip top of the handle. Stretching out as far as I could, I sent it sailing through the air in a big arc and down on top of the prehistoric insect.

Thwack! I nailed it!

And then it proceeded to crawl up the handle of the broom. I abandoned my newly found weapon and went running back to my bedroom and jumped up on the bed. Needless to say I was about 30 minutes late for work that day. I just waited until it crawled away. On my way home that day I bought the biggest can of industrial strength bug spray I could find and from that day forward would drown anything that crossed my threshold. 

Fast forward 5 years and I was in Atlanta in our old house 8 months pregnant with a 19 month old. A lot can happen in 5 years right!? My new house had these creepy crawly bugs with about a gazillion legs that would scitter across the floor like a freaking spider on crack. I think they were centipedes? Milipedes? I have no idea, all I know is they made my skin crawl. The first time I saw one I was lucky that my sister, the bug killer, was there and took care of it for me.  One day Noah and I were in the kitchen and something falling from the ceiling caught my attention and I heard a sharp slap right behind. I turned around and one of those creepy bugs was sitting right next to my brand new diaper bag. That damn thing had fallen from the ceiling and landed inches away from my bag. I shudder to think if it had fallen in it and I hadn’t known it!! I’m pretty sure if it had fallen on me I would have gone into labor right then and there!

I shrieked “Ahhhhhhhh!!!!! A Bug!!!! And waddled my way around the counter and hoisted my over sized self onto a chair. Noah was totally enthralled by all the fuss I was making and started hopping around on the floor screeching and clapping. During all the commotion the nasty bug had run for cover under my diaper bag, no doubt terrified. I carefully stepped down from the chair and got the broom. I began divising a plan. The door leading down to the basement was about 3 feet from the my bag and it’s captive. The door had about a 2 1/2” crack underneath it. I was going to lift the bag and use the broom to send that bug flying. He didn’t move when I lifted the bag, no doubt frozen in shock, and I swung the broom at him like it was game 7 in the Stanley Cup finals. He skidded across the floor and under the door.

Goal!!!!!!

And then that little bastard came running back in!! I screamed again and swung the broom at him again sending him flying once again under the door. This time he stayed gone. Whew!

Afterwards every time my heart rate would begin to settle down Noah would yell “Ah A BUG!” and hop around laughing. Even though I knew he was just playing I would still quickly scan the floor, ceiling, and walls for insects, paranoid that the ninja bug had crawled back under the door. I finally grabbed a towel from the laundry room to shove under the door just in case.

All of this is to say that I am immensely, unrealistically scared of bugs. They don’t paralyze me, thankfully, but I am horrible at killing them!!

Enter The Original Bug Zapper! There are two things that I love about this wonderful contraption.

1. It has a long handle!! Bugs are very unpredictable and I prefer to stay as far away as possible. When Eric is killing one I most often will go in the other room and stand on a piece of furniture.

2. It zaps them! That means those suckers are almost always instantly dead, eliminating the unpredictableness issue. AND there is no nasty squishing, cracking sound. Yuck, that just makes me cringe thinking about it. There is only a nice satisfying ZAP!! Most importantly there is no need for bug spray which I don’t want to use in the house with the kids around.

I highly recommend it!

 

Some of the links above are affiliate links. If you purchase something using one of these links I will make a very small commission. All opinions are my own and completely genuine. 🙂 I purchased the zapper with my own hard earned money.