Cricket Watch - Day 3

He's followed me to work. It may be one of his friends. Regardless there's now one in the bushes behind my office that is just as loud. 

Why do crickets have to be so annoying?

I think the one that was keeping me up at night moved into our garage yesterday. I was washing dishes last night and heard one just chirping away in there. Better in there than outside my bedroom window.

Thankfully, I have not been woken up by a cricket in two nights now. I don't know if the one that had been keeping me up has moved on or decided to be nice and be quiet. 

Either way, I think cricket watch is over. Now on to more important things....

Cricket Watch

I seem to have gotten in a pattern of posting something to my blog about every three months or so. Excuses aside, I'm just going to jump right back in and hope that I don't go another three months without a post. (Honestly, I don't think I will -- in fact I know I won't, given the fact I have a major topic that is going to take a LONG time to write about of a LONG series of posts - the topic I promise is not about crickets)

Anyway, "Cricket watch?" you ask?

There's this cricket that has been my nemesis for about a week now. He lives outside the window closest to me in the bedroom and starts chirping about 11pm each night.

He's annoying.

He'll start up randomly throughout the night -- and just as randomly will stop. He always seems to know when I'm trying to figure out where he is.

He knows exactly what he's doing.

He's waking me up - at 1:30 am, 3 am, 5 am. At times when I really don't want to be woken up.

I'm one of these people that really enjoys my sleep. I've been knowing to turn sleeping into an art form. I slept through Hurricane Hugo. There's not much that can wake me up.

Except this stupid little cricket.

The first couple nights, I really thought he was in the room he was so loud. I checked one corner where I thought the sound was coming from. Then it would stop for a moment -- and start back up from what sounded like the other corner of the wall with the window. Chirp, search, repeat.

I eventually realized he was living right outside the window. He is just one really loud little bugger.

Last night during a lull in the rain we had had most of the evening, he started chirping again around 11:30. So I went outside and unloaded the household Ortho pump spray I have all over the ground, foundation, wall and window. I was hoping he would get the message and leave.

No such luck.

About an hour later he started up again. And woke me up at least twice that I can recall throughout the night. Once I was up, he just continued to chirp for the rest of morning while my wife and I got ready for church.

My wife says she can't hear him. But for some reason I can't tune him out.

So tonight, right around 11:30, he was at it again.

But I had an extra special present for him tonight. I bought one of those bottles of exterior pest Ortho that attaches to the hose and proceeded to saturate the ground outside the bedroom, the entire exterior wall, the bushes, the eaves, and the window frames with it.

It's 1:15 am right now. He's been quiet so far tonight since I sprayed his hangout down. That's a good sign that maybe he got the message and has decided to hop down the road permanently and annoy someone else.

In the meantime, I'm strategizing my next step in case he is just hiding or playing dead. If Cricket Watch goes into a third night, I am going to be really perturbed.

Either way, game on pal.