Suchi?!

Where I’m from, we call that stuff bait!  That’s a line from a commercial Terry Bradshaw did in the early 2000s:

All these years later, I still say that line every once in a while.  Terry Bradshaw was my dad’s QB.  Big Ben became my Terry Bradshaw early on in his career with his heroics.  I love that guy, he’ll always be my QB.

Anyways, I attended an online sushi cooking class prepared by some of the other people working here at BWC.  I had never made sushi before, so I was kind of looking forward to it.  There were a lot of weird ingredients I was supposed to buy like sushi rice, rice vinegar, soy sauce, etc.  Not weird really, but just things I had never bought before.  So here’s how it went.

I try not to eat white rice, so I just used some brown rice I had.  That would come back to bite me later on.  Rice vinegar?  I don’t even use regular vinegar, yeah right.  Soy sauce?  What am I ever going to do with a bottle of soy sauce?  So, I just went out to eat at a Chinese food place that same day for lunch and asked them for a few things of soy sauce.  Check.  Deciding to attend this class set into motion an interesting chain of events, with a bizarre culmination that I doubt many people have or will ever replicate.

So, I brought my Chinese food back home and ate it since we’re not allowed to eat at the restaurants yet.  I was about to start eating when I remembered they gave me chopsticks.  I like to eat with those since they force you to eat slower.  But I was starving, so I said forget that.  That was prescient on my part, without even knowing it.

I ate my food, delicious.  Later that afternoon, I attended my sushi class and proceeded to produce this:

“Suchi!”

Feel free to laugh, I was laughing the whole time I was making it, it was just awful.  Apart from two or three good pieces, it looked like the majority of them were laden with a wasabi bomb that decided to explode.  That’s what you get when you don’t follow instructions and are lazy with ingredients.  Oh well, it was my first (and possibly last) attempt at sushi.  Although, it was kind of fun and not too difficult.

Fast forward to yesterday morning.  I get up and take a few practice swings with my tennis racket oblivious to what’s about to come next.  It’s been hot the last couple days, so my cockroach preparedness levels have spiked.  I have my game plan ready this year.  Cockroach broom, check.  Spraying all the walls and corners with anti-roach spray, done.  I’m feeling pretty good.

And then, I see something in the window sill that looks out of place.  What the heck is that?  Oh, it’s moving.  Maybe it’s a fly.  Man that’s a big fly.  Oh…my friend.  Welcome back.  Mark the date — May 17, 2020 — the first cockroach of the year.  Mind you, it wasn’t like the normal big ones I’m used to, it was rather docile and just not moving fast.  I don’t know what was wrong with it.

Anyways, after the obligatory outrage and not nice words, I figured let’s get on with it.  But this guy’s in a really weird spot.  He was in the window jam area, a thin one-inch space between two metal guide rails.  How am I supposed to get him out of there?  I tried to encourage him to go outside somehow and managed to do so, but he just crawled back inside.  Fabulous.  Again, he was pretty relaxed, but still, he had to go.

Window jam

What do I do?  I can’t use my cockroach broom — too bulky and won’t work with the metal guides.  Spraying wouldn’t do any good either, I’d still have to get him out of that area somehow.  And then…the idea of the century.  Don’t I still have those chopsticks somewhere?  I thought to myself how absurd is this?  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was the only way to go.

So I scrambled and thankfully, I still had them!  Now the hard part.  How do you convince your brain to grab a cockroach with a pair of chopsticks and then dump him out the window, where hopefully it won’t hit someone in the head.  I’m not checking outside before I fling him out!

So, I gently grabbed my friend with the chopsticks, and then dropped him outside the window.  I’m on the first floor, not too high up.  As soon as  that was done, I did my spider dance and chucked those chopsticks in the trash.  All that remained was the paper sleeve.

I have a new weapon in my arsenal now

Good lord, the things I do here that never crossed my mind anywhere else, not even in Colombia.  I didn’t come across a single cockroach over there, except in the Amazon.  Let’s see how the summer shakes out.