Taking the HI out of hiatus!

So…hey. It’s been awhile.

I feel like things could get a little awkward here, so I’m gonna just push through it.

Guess who joined me on my drive home from the store the other day?

“GO BLOG ABOUT THIS”

If you’re a follower of my pointless ramblings, you know that the crickets hate me and often send grasshoppers out to scare and intimidate me. So I wasn’t all that surprised to see this guy staring me down from my dashboard. Thanks for reminding me to blog, nasty thing. “Preshiate ya.

So yeah, we moved. That’s why the no blogs in like three months. It all happened so fast…….I’m still not exactly sure how. I did a lot of smiling, nodding, and signing. Oh, and packing. I would estimate about 76 miles of corrugated cardboard passed through my hands during the months of May and June. We are now 15 minutes away from our old house in a general northwesterly direction. Why did we move? It sounds so lame to say we needed more room. Our old house was about 1800 square feet. Why was this not enough room for our family of 4 (plus cat & dog)? I have no idea. Growing up in South Florida my 4 person family lived happily in 1000 square feet. And we had turtles and cats and dogs and hamsters and whatever else too. I don’t remember ever feeling cramped. Go figure. My excuse is this is Texas. The rate of square feet exchange is like 50%. Or some other math figure that makes sense.

So what else?

Since I like to show you random food I’ve made, I’m going to do it again now.

Sorry about Ariel’s “seashells” there. Crass.

This was for special breakfast and it was egg, hashbrowns, cheese, and ketchup. Food pyramid complete.

Mac ‘n Cheese Burger

I posted this one on Facebook during my blog hiatus, and told myself I would go back and do a whole post on it because it was THAT good. Well that clearly didn’t happen, but these were mindblowing anyway. MO: Stuff cooked Mac & Cheese into hamburger patties and cook. I think I slathered barbecue sauce on these. Sounds like something I would do.

Alrighty, that’s all for now. I’m rusty and all this took me like an hour. Better next time. xoxo

Cricket Match

Are fearless crickets a Texas thing? Or have they developed a need for diplomacy with the humans over the last several years? Until I moved here, my only contact with crickets was hearing them chirp from afar at nightfall during summer. “What’s that? Aw, the crickets are chirping! Let’s go roast s’mores!”

Then I laid eyes on one. I am embarrassingly terrified of bugs, and was not at all pleased at what these things look like. One tiny step up from a roach, basically. You’d think I’d be able to handle my bugs better since I grew up in the palmetto bug capital of the world, but no. I know they smell my fear a mile away, and think it’s just hilarious to taunt me. “Hey look, she’s scared! Let’s jump in her hair!’

I’ve posted before about being cornered and harassed by crickets. It was gang violence at its worst. Well it happened again (twice) at the gym. The first time I was in a group exercise class and a cricket comes jumping up to my mat. My mission at this point becomes to kill it without getting close enough to touch it (or to give it access to my hair). I swipe it with my towel which gets me nothing but a few pleas to not kill it from bug lovers in the room. Why me, nasty cricket!? There were 25 other people in the room! Jump over to one of the bug lovers and lay in her hair, she’ll probably let you do pilates right along with her. The instructor tried to stomp it with her shoe, but was stopped by more cries from the gallery to let it live. Some bug activist finally got up and removed the thing, with her bare hand, UGH. The same exact thing happened in the same class about a week later. This time the instructor quickly squashed it with her shoe before anyone was the wiser. You go, girl! No word on whether it was the same cricket as the week before, but if it was, you have to agree he had it coming to him, being back in that same room.

Well today I was hunted again. I was in the car, after taking my son to his dentist appointment, and he said “Mama, look! A bug!” Those dreaded words. Somehow instead of running the car off the road and melting down, I keep it together. “Oh, where?” (Keep it casual, the kid’s watching) He points up. “There!”

I look up to the sunroof and see this.

There was a long moment of sheer panic while my brain struggled to determine what side of the glass he was on. Outside. Heart rate slowing. I’m going to live. We ride for a few minutes while my son chatters away with Mr. Cricket and I try to pretend I’m cool with him being there. We stop at a light and I look up. Is he…glaring at me? Has he come to avenge the death of his loved one from the gym?

I decide rather than going straight home and letting Gym Bug’s Avenger corner me in my garage, it’s safer to take a detour and try to lose him. We drove to the grocery store and ran inside. By the time we came out, he was gone. I know this stare down was a horse-head-in-the-bed message from the crickets. “Watch your back, we know where to find you.” Shudder.

UPDATE: So apparently this guy is a grasshopper, not a cricket. Great, now I’m gonna have the Grasshoppers mad at me too.