And this is why I hate bugs

So I should start off by saying I'm not a fan of most bugs. I can handle mosquitoes and the occasional lady bug, but other than that, not a fan. I'm especially afraid of bees, hornets, wasps and other stinging insects.

So on Tuesday I spotted what I thought was a wasp near the ceiling of my bedroom. Now normally I would run out of the room screaming, close the door shut, and wait for Mr. Ellis to come home and get it. Unfortunately, Mr. Ellis was gone for the night in Chicago, and I was going to have to solve this problem, otherwise I was sleeping on the couch.

Now luckily hornets are usually half dead by this time of the year, and they're just looking for a place to get warm. So I was brave enough to go back in the room and take a closer look. Upon inspecting this slow crawling insect, I notice it wasn't a hornet at all but a scary long bug with lots of legs and big antennae.

Here is a poorly drawn version of the scary bug in its actual size:

This presented a whole new dilemma. I had no idea what kind of bug this was, thusly I had no idea what kind of super powers it had. My belief is all bugs have super powers and usually try to trick you into believing it cannot do certain things such as leaping, flying, biting, stinging, revealing hidden wings, turning into a completely different bug altogether. My feeling was that since this bug was crawling so slow it certainly had a hidden super power. I felt it was most likely "leaping off of the wall at me to tear my face off". Well maybe not tear my face off, but certainly to scare the heck out of me that I would remain paralyzed in the fetal position in my room until Mr. Ellis came home.

So upon the suggestion of a friend, I tried spraying hair spray at it hoping it would shrivel up and die. Now this probably would have worked wonderfully except I couldn't get myself to stand any closer than about ten feet away and my hair spray probably had a radius of about five feet. So I just ended up with a whole lot of hair spray landing on my carpet and bed. I then turned to air freshener, which definitely had a greater radius, but seemed to have little effect other than have the bug fall off the ceiling consequently making me scream. I continued to spray for another 30 seconds, but this bug seemed to be not affected. It did manage to crawl back down into our heating vent were I was hoping it was going to die. But subconsciously my theory had changed on what super power it had. I suspected it didn't have the "leaping off the wall at me to tear my face off" super power, but a much worse super power: "armor of steel that could quite possibly help it survive through nuclear war." This is definitely the most troublesome super power since without me probably setting it on fire, I was not going to be able to kill it. But I managed to sleep on Mr. Ellis's side of the bed with the covers over my head hoping it would not come out to get me.

But I should have known better that it wouldn't come back. As I went into my bedroom today and picked up my cat Betty, I found the bug underneath her. Of course the bug was still alive because my cats don't like to actually kill the things they find, they just like to watch them and maybe paw at them a couple times.

I tried to turn Betty around and have her look at the bug again, telling her to "Go get it!". But all she did was sniff at my finger and then felt things were getting too weird and crawled under the bed. So I grabbed my other cat, Domino, off the bed and put him near the bug. After turning around a bit and looking at me with the "what is going on lady?" look, I had to forcibly put his head right above it for him to notice. Of course, he only stared a bit and then meandered off.

I again tried in vain with the air freshener, hairspray, and even Tilex bath cleaner all to no avail. And I'm saying I poured these things on the bug, but it still crawled around on the carpet. It eventually made it up to my cats' scratching post. At this point I figured I had a good enough angle to hit it with a rolled up magazine. Although I didn't want to get as close as I had to, and I feared it would stick to the magazine I was holding, I felt I had no option. I hit it twice and it still was moving, so I reared back and gave one last smack. And so far it has remained motionless for the last 2 hours.

But I don't give up hope that it will come back to life after the stunning effects of the pummeling wear off...