Yesterday, the Husbandlet and I unpacked most of our books and put them on bookshelves.

(N.B.: Our stuff has not arrived, but we mailed all our books to ourselves because the Media Mail rate was cheap, expecting to have our books be the last things to arrive. Ironically, of course, the books got here before anything else.)

We picked up one tall bookshelf at a garage sale, and our house has some built-in shelves in the basement/kids’ play room. I must say, our house looks a lot more homey with our books out. Unpacking our books and organizing them was like spending the afternoon with old friends.

During the preparatory stages of book-sorting, I got out the Windex and cleaned off the office bookshelf and the Husbandlet’s new-to-us desk (he got it from a business in town that was downsizing). Then I noticed that the phone was sitting a little crooked on its stand. I pushed the phone’s base down. Not much happened. I picked the whole thing up and tried to straighten it. Nothing doing. I noticed a strange, sweet smell emanating from the phone … somehow, this smell was all too familiar. So I pulled the base off the stand and

OH MY GOODNESS I AM STILL SHUDDERING

found two large but somewhat unhappy-looking cockroaches nesting in the stand, in the part that rests against the back of the base.

I took the stand outside and shook the cockroaches into the street. Then I went back inside. It occurred to me that perhaps, in doing this, I had inadvertently introduced the hearty Eastern Seaboard Cockroach to the Frozen North, thereby creating an infestation that would torment the place forevermore. So I went back out, found the roaches, and squished them.

(They hadn’t gotten very far. It was about 40 degrees out, and I had dropped them on a very wet, paved street. They had made it to the rivulets of water at the side of the road.)

In the meantime, the Husbandlet had unscrewed the cover off the back of the base, and had found ANOTHER cockroach INSIDE.

People, those roaches had been living inside our phone for the last month at least.

I’m sorry, but I didn’t get any pictures.