creepy crawlers

i hate centipedes.  i don't know if it's their long, spidery legs or how they appear to float across the floor when they crawl.  there's just something creepy about them that makes my hair stand on end and my insides yell, gross!  i'm shivering even at the thought of them.

i tend to notice them more during the change in seasons, which is now (hooray).  they like to hang out on the walls of the basement surrounding the stairwell, which are stark white compared to their dark brown bodies, so needless to say, they stick out like a sore thumb.  whenever i see one (or sometimes 2!) positioned by the stairs, i have to give myself a pep talk into going down that night to clean out the cat litter.  if one is on a side wall, i'm usually okay with running past it (while sticking to the opposite wall), but if i have to walk underneath one, you can forget about it.  i'll tell myself it will be gone in the morning.  and it always is.  where does it go?  who knows, but let's not talk about that.

i rarely see them in the house (apart from the basement) but the other night when i was about to head upstairs, i saw movement from the corner of my eye.  i looked closer and realized a centipede was resting against my husband's shoe.  of course i totally freaked, especially because i couldn't possibly smash it against his shoe!  i managed to shoo it away from that particular shoe, but then it climbed into his other shoe.  this would not do.  i smacked the shoe and it ran across the floor (ew).  i grabbed the closest diffuser (which happened to be some body mist stuff) i could find but the spray technique didn't work very well.  it climbed onto one of the cabinets, and to my horror, into the crack between the drawers.  i wondered if i could let it go, but decided that i'd never get to sleep knowing there was this disgusting bug in one of my drawers.  so i worked up enough nerve to go through the contents, lifting up plastic utensils, napkins, placements, then dish towels.  nothing.  where was the sucker?  so i opened and closed the drawer a couple times, hoping it would scare the thing into fleeing.  it did.  mr. ugly scurried towards the cat food (yikes!), then changed direction (thank goodness) and headed into our watering pitcher that happened to be laying on its side on the floor.  i grabbed the pitcher and turned it upright, but the nasty thing was already staring to make its way back out!  this is when i filled a cup with water and drowned it.  can you believe it?  so much work to be rid of a stupid bug.

and after all that, i still didn't sleep soundly that night.  i kept feeling an itch where there wasn't one.