Tiny Livestock

One of the drawbacks to the sudden, overnight departure of the 13+ illegal aliens that lived in the apartment upstairs is that the colony of roaches with which they cohabited are now in desperate need of food. No longer having the steady resource of garbage available that they used to rely on the colony has spread out into other residences in search of sustenance.

Namely, my place.

We don't live in a ghetto*, but the complex is priced for young couples and young people don't clean up after themselves because they are not used to mommy not doing it for them. A common tactic from some renters about apartments in this price range is that a legitimate person will rent a place and sub-let it out to others who need a place or those who have a reason not to be in the system. In the case of several of my neighbors that means undocumented immigrants. When the management finds out what is going on they terminate the leases and evict the occupants. It doesn't take a genius to figure out which apartment has such residences. In each case closet doors are removed and stored on the balcony (to make that much more room for another mattress) and a curtain hangs the width of the living room (so the blinds on the balcony can be open for light and air while preventing anyone from seeing how many people are actually in the residence). The extra folks upstairs not on the lease were already kicked out once before but after a few weeks a group moved back in. I've counted no less than 18 mattresses piled by the dumpster each time the residents are kicked out of the 2 room apartments.

I don't care about their legal status because they are human beings who need a place to live and a job to work, but they could have kept the noise down. You'd think a herd of disco-loving dancing elephants lived in the place from the noise they made at all hours. Additionally, my wife didn't appreciate the bags full of garbage and piles of empty beer cans dripping their contents down onto our space from the balcony above.

Anyways...

In the last few weeks I've sprayed enough poison to surely lower the family's IQ by several points and cause us all genetic damage that will undoubtedly manifest in interesting ways in generations to come but the bug problem is getting under control again thanks to a few carpet bombings and attention by the property management. For a while it was very annoying. I couldn't even cook a meal. Put a spoon down on the counter while cooking to get something from the refrigerator and when turned back there would be a bug on the spoon. This was unacceptable. I haven't lived in a place with roaches since I was in Texas 20 years ago** and I wasn't about to now.

I set up glue traps around the apartment (which also has variant of Trashvertising) to snare the few bugs that survived the gassing.


The packaging of the traps was alarming. I don't know where the majority of this product is sold but I don't want to live anywhere a freaking anaconda is considered a "common household pest".

* It's many hundreds of dollars less expensive than where I last lived and has 1/3 more space. We had to move to a less costly (and what I call transitional) place due to the dysfunctional payroll system of my employer and the incompetence of career managers who were unable to resolve what was originally a simple small pay error in less than 3 months and who comically compounded the error to surreal levels, causing serious deleterious effects to my finances.

** The definition of a luxury home in Texas is vermin infested hell-hole.

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