In dispraise of cockroaches

Hey ho people, I know there are a few out there - and I have cancelled my sitemeter thing because after my previous rant I got several comments and still it registered no visits, so I ditched the useless piece of junk, it wasn't helping my ego!

Anyway, here I sit in my parents' living room under the sweet, sweet air-con after everyone else has gone to bed, swatting away the very persistent mosquito which seems intent on getting a piece of me and feeling pretty pleased with myself for managing to swim around in a pool all day and not get burnt! Lovely to see the parents, even if they still do my head in the way that only parents can, and lovely to get out of the rain!

We've been battling the monsters here though - Catherine my travelling buddy and I had a fight with a massive cockroach last night after it had the audacity to sit on her Marie-Claire magazine and wink at her as she tried to go to bed! We have a can of magic bug spray which kills them dead but I think it's a bit like mustard gas for them, they go a bit mental before they die and scrabble around on their backs (always their backs, why?!) while we stand there and watch, feeling ashamed and villainous. I'd be a crap Buddhist. Anyway, the magazine just happened to be next to Catherine's toothbrush which was a bit of an issue - this bug spray does not smell good so I doubt it would taste good either - but after some obligatory squeaking we sprayed it lots and sure enough, the scrabbling began. Catherine pipes up in a wee plaintive voice, 'can we put it outside? I don't really want it dying in my room!' so we hatch a plan to scoop it out of the window. This plan fails when we can't find a dustpan - we have a long handled broom and neither of us is willing to get closer than the length of this broom, so in the end Catherine sweeps it down the stairs! She was sweeping one stair at a time, but since the floors are patterned marble and it was dark it was kind of hard to see this here roach, so eventually we swept it down about seven at once and out the front door. Drama over! Amazingly, we didn't wake the parents, despite all the squeaking. It was a BIG roach. It was. I'm not just being a wimp. Really.

Anyway, I've just finished reading a great Ben Elton book called 'The First Casualty', I recommend it highly - I started it on saturday and finished it today, but I read another book in the middle about a guy who died for like 9 minutes and had a bit of an Ebenezer Scrooge experience, it was interesting but very far out. Now I'm gonna get back to the Jodi Picoult I was in the middle of before finishing Ben Elton became a priority so I could leave it for my mum!

Sorry for the boring post, I'm using safari on a mac and it doesn't allow html so I can't do anything exciting. Well, that's one reason - the other is I'm on holiday and it's bedtime and I like bedtime!

Back to the UK on friday night, get in at some ungodly hour (yes, 5:30am straight off a plane onto a bus then a train then another bus, grooo) on saturday morning and have to hoof it back from Even Bigger City to Big City and try to unpack some of the seven thousand boxes that still remain before shadowing on monday! More then, sure I will have some adventures getting lost in Big City Infirmary!