"It feels like walking on fortune cookies..."

The past week has been all kinds of fucked up.

And that's putting it lightly.

Let me say in all honesty that the least absurd thing that happened was that a squirrel tried to claw its way into our bedroom through the window screen.  Seriously. We have no idea why. Our best guess is that it saw our basil plant in the window, saw that the window was open, and just decided to go for it.

He ran away when we shut the window, but not far - and he did a number on our screen. Christ.

Like I said, though - that was small potatoes.

The Bug Guy came back, just like he said he would. He pried up a couple planks, just like he said would. And then he crawled underneath our floors, into our aptly named (but inaccessible from goddamned anywhere else) crawlspace to distribute the cricket poison.

We learned two things when he came back up through our living room floor.

One) We had the worst infestation of crickets he had ever seen. "The walls are completely covered with them," he said. Bug Guys, as you might imagine, are not easily creeped out by, well, bugs. He was visibly rattled.

Two) That word "walls" wasn't a slip.

We have a basement.

Apparently, after a short foray down the crawlspace, our exterminator found himself looking into a small basement situated underneath our kitchen/bathroom, with stairs going up to a bricked over doorway behind what is currently our washer/dryer.

It was, of course, ground zero for the crickets.

He put down as much poison as he'd brought, then left. Quickly.

Neither the Wife and nor I were particularly eager to go down there in an hurry.  Especially not after seeing Bug Guy's reaction.

So we waited a couple days to let the stuff take effect, and have since then spent most of our free time taking turns wedging ourselves between the floorboards to clean up thousands of dead crickets.

It is dark and claustrophobic and our flashlights are really not strong enough and we do. not. like. it.

But we have a basement. A basement that was bricked up. What the hell? Probably because the builder who majorly renovated this building before we moved in was a big proponent of the cheap-and-fast model. Why repair a problematic basement when you can just pretend it's not there?

Sometime in the next few days, when it is not so goddamned horrifying and I have worked up my nerve, I'll have to go check it out properly.