I seem to be a magnet for weird apartment issues, especially when it comes to other species.

First there was the time a bird got into my apartment through the disconnected dryer vent. I came home one evening to find that I had HAD a visitor flying, pooping and making mayhem in my little home for hours, and she was still there. I felt like the 3 bears dealing with Goldilocks. I promptly called the management, and they came over with a butterfly net and blanket and rescued my visitor. They also covered the dryer vent so she and her friends would NOT return. I remember the hours of cleaning afterwards. Armed with my ever-attractive domestic yellow gloves, I scrubbed my apartment clean, washed linens until the wee hours of the morning and carefully checked out all my furniture and other belongings for evidence of bird droppings. I next requesteed that my carpets be steam cleaned. Amazingly, I survived without getting the bird flu.

Now, I’ve never considered myself a biologist or someone who could possibly discover a new species, but I did find myself in the position of having to call maintenance to report that I had bugs living in my fridge and freezer. I know--what kind of bug could possibly live in that environment, right? Well, I still don't have a clue. What I did know at the time was that I had killed several of these strange creatures, and I wanted to know what to do next. So they came over, checked things out and told me that they didn’t see any bugs in my fridge or freezer. A couple of days later, I had killed a few more, and so I called them back to report it again. The next day at work, I got a call from the office. They still hadn’t spotted any bugs in my fridge, but they curiously suggested that I must have been seeing pieces of fridge/freezer insulation floating around, and so they had opted to replace my refrigerator and that should solve the problem. It did solve the problem—no more bugs! But since when does insulation have 6 legs and a pair of wings? A couple of weeks afterwards, I spotted one of the same bugs on my car window...now I thought about collecting he/she as evidence, but I resisted the urge. I decided that didn’t want to have a bug named after me due to my discovery. Besides, I knew in my heart that I certainly had NOT been killing pieces of insulation, and that was all that mattered.

In the next apartment, there was the invasion of the pill bugs or sow bugs. These crunchy little creatures were literally swarming into the large 2-bedroom apartment I was sharing with my sister. Not only did we find them crawling all over our floor, but if you lifted or moved any furniture, you would find several or many of them there, mostly dead. I’m not afraid of the pill bug, but it was the sheer number of them that got annoying. My sister and I were vacuuming almost daily to just keep our floors clear and free of the bugs. We made numerous calls to management to get it resolved. They tried several different types of insecticides, and eventually one of them did the trick. No more pill bugs.

Of course, I have had bird issues in my current apartment as well. Ingenious as they are, these birds have somehow maneuvered a way to live somewhere between my 2nd floor ceiling and the apartment above me. I could hear them regularly during the spring months that year, and believe me, baby birds can squawk rather loudly in the morning when they are hungry. Well, the maintenance office just didn’t believe me. “We don’t have bird problems, Ma’am.” So, I did some investigating on my own one day, and I spotted a small mother bird towing a worm in her beak and going into a tiny outside vent up near my apartment outside wall. So I called maintenance again, and this time they climbed a ladder along the brick wall and sure enough, they found the bird and her nest. They removed the bird and sealed off the vent with a screen. Now somehow I heard that familiar squawk again this spring for a few weeks, but I opted not to call it in.

And more recently, I’ve been sharing my apartment with crickets. Yes, crickets! I spotted 1 in my dining room earlier this week and quickly dispersed of him. Then a couple of hours later, I spotted another in the dining room, and so again, I discarded of him as well. I tried to tell myself that it was just a fluke, but already I had a nagging suspicion that it wasn’t a chance encounter. But then I had a full day without any cricket sightings, and so I started to wonder if it had been a fluke after all. However, I got up yesterday morning, and I had a new boundless jumper in my bathroom. I tried to terminate him, but he escaped his death sentence for the time being. Then last night, before going to bed, I laid 3 more crickets to rest. It had officially become a full-scale operation now. 1 or 2 crickets--seemed like a fluke, and maybe just maybe they followed me in through the door. 5 or 6 crickets--that is an enemy raid! So I’ve called maintenance to report it, and we’ll see what the outcome is.

I’m hoping to have a cricket-free weekend, but don’t hold your breath. And if one more person tries to tell me that having lots of crickets is a sign of good luck, I’m going to scream! If you had large jumping insects hopping all over your furniture and floors, you might just think differently...Trust me!