Thursday, April 16, 2009

Now that'll get you going in the morning

When Jeremy and I leave for the day, we go out our garage, which we have to lift manually. When Jeremy left today, the garage made a bunch of noise as always, and Jeremy added to that noise by throwing a lot of expletives. He bounded back into the house urging me to come look at what he had discovered. By the din he made, I half expected to see a rattle snake, and what was there was just as bad (no, it's not a rat):

This picture does not do much justice to the centipede, but look at the website below and those images are exactly what was in our garage.

This six inch centipede had landed on the ground not two inches from Jeremy's head. The horror! We deliberated on how to handle the situation (I clearly made it known it was a finder's keeper's situation: he found the problem and therefore must keep the responsibility of solution). Would Raid be effective? What would be sturdy enough to beat it? Never did we consider keeping it alive. My wimpy self shut the door and told him to deal with it before I vomited out of terror. Brave Jeremy then picked up a shoe and beat the centipede 10 times to its demise. He then put it in a ziplock bag so we could show our pest guy.

Jeremy using a gopher to put the centipede into a plastic bag.

My stellar researching found this website. Now what is unclear is the nesting habits of this particular breed of centipede. There could be hundreds more for all we know. What I do know is that it will be a long time before I go into the garage again, which is a shame since that is where we keep our brand new washer and dryer. Luckily, I did all my laundry the other day.

Let's give it up for Jeremy. He not only almost got it from a centipede but was able to pull it together to get rid of the problem. He may be Indiana Jones-ish--my hero!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

yuck! hope you don't find more or run out of clean clothes!