Go ahead. Ask. “What are you doing up at 2:41 in the morning, Juile?”

Good…freakin’…QUESTION! I woke up not long ago because my cell phone was chirping too loudly about its dying battery. As I was sleepily lumbering through the place, trying to find the stupid thing, I was interrupted by the insanely annoying sound of something BUZZING. Loud buzzing, in fact. It sounded like a personal light aircraft ready to take off from my bathroom floor.

I flicked on the light to discover (surprise!) one of the most beloved of all our Florida creatures, a palm bug.

For all of you blessed innocents who just got here from the north last week, a palm bug is a huge, hulking cousin of the roach. Palms bugs are even more fun because A.) they can grow larger than some toddlers, and B.) they fly. Some girls run and get someone else to squish it for them. That would be the sensible thing to do. I, on the other hand, am a fearless insect poacher, ready to bring ‘em back dead or alive (and possibly mount its head on my office wall as a prize).

So here I am, faced with the task of killing this giant winged thing that has taken over my bathroom, and I tried to figure out the best, most hygenic, and most efficient way of taking it down. This turned into a complicated process.

1.) First I spied a basket of clean laundry in my hallway. “Perfect!” I said, and dropped the full plastic basket squarely on top of it. Can you believe the thing was STILL ALIVE?? I should’ve made the bug carry it from the laundry room to begin with. I thought of keeping it for a pet, so I could train it to ferry my clean clothes back and forth, but that seemed like too much work and I returned to the problem at hand.

2.) OK, what now? After the laundry-basket experience, the bug realized I meant war and scuttled for my bath rug. Hey, not a bad idea! I lifted the corner and allowed it to crawl underneath, then lowered the corner again so it was trapped. Then I started jumping up and down on the rug to squish it. Yes, there I was, jumping all over my bath rug at 2:30 AM like an idiot. I’m sure I didn’t look half as foolish as I felt.

3.) I peeled back the rug, ready to sweep up the remains. Alas, as Kronk said in “The Emperor’s New Groove,” “He’s not as dead as we would have hoped.” The poor thing was still limping along, close to death but unwilling to surrender, and at this point I was ready to call up my friend Mike to see if I could borrow his hunting rifle. I was reasonably certain it could no longer fly away and it was now squishable by average means, the shoe. I reached for my old sandals…no, if I were going to squish something that large, I’d better go for something close-toed. I finally did the thing in and had to use two tissues to wipe its guts off the tile.

Palm bugs: Florida’s leading cause of insomnia…

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