小强 (little strong)

once a blue moon, i do find one or two cockroaches in my house. usually, this happens in my bathroom. and when this happens, i will catch them and throw them out of my window. i don't ever want to harm them, much less kill them.

couple of weeks back, i saw one fully grown one in my room, just outside my toilet. it ran off when i tried to catch it and hid behind my book shelf. and since then, i had had this cockroach smell coming out of the sink in my toilet. the smell was particularly strong when i bend down to wash my face. i suspected the same cockroach had migrated (i assume it's the same one) into the toilet and now resides there. my suspicion was confirmed last week when i spotted this cockroach on my vanity top. once again, i couldn't catch it as it ran into the crevice before i could even do anything. after that, i started seeing cockroach droppings on my sink every morning.

feeling disturbed and not wanting to allow it to multiply, i decided to purchase a cockroach trap. most traps come with some sort of adhesive/ poison and work by killing them, something that goes against my principle of not killing. but there was one i found that merely trap them without killing them. it is even reuseable! of cos, i happily bought it, and set it up by placing some potato chips in the trap before deploying it on my sink. that was over the last weekend. i would excitedly check it every morning but there was none...

then this morning, to my pleasant surprise, i found one! alas, and to my worst fears, this was not the one i had hoped to catch. it has no wings - that means it is a young cockroach, not the one i saw. this could only mean my room has more than one cockroach! omg! anyway, i left it in the trap and headed off to work. let's hope its presence in the trap attracts others to come out. will continue to monitor the trap over the next couple of days. hopefully more appears.

:-)

ps: till this day, i still don't really understand why we refer to the cockroach affectionately as "小强" (little strong).