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@walklightly You must have lots of cockroaches in Australia.
One, not so romantic thing happened on my honeymoon with my first wife. We were staying at my parents house in the main bedroom. There were open beams in the ceiling. In the middle of the night my wife woke up screaming. Roaches were walking along the beam and some fell and landed on top of her!

My very first night on my very first trip to Hawaii we stayed in an over-the-top suite at the Royal Hawaiian. I'll never forget the giant cockroach sitting in the middle of the bath tub. I'd have sworn it would take two hands to strangle it or that you could throw a saddle on it and fly away. (They fly there.) I almost jumped out of my skin. I ended up living on Oahu for 8 years and the sight became routine. I especially enjoyed watching the geckos patrolling the walls and ceilings looking for roaches to devour, a miniature prehistoric sci-fi scene from a '50's monster flick.

@JackPedigo, only if you offer them a steady supply of benchtop crumbs ...myum myum.

@VictoriaNotes You are probably getting sick of my stories but here's a funny one. On the main island of San Juan are two cities, Friday Harbor (the county seat) and Roche Harbor. Roche Harbor has an amazing marina (I once saw a yacht owned by Barbara Streisand moored there). Small condos go for $1 million+. They like to refer to themselves as Roche's (french pronunciation) but everyone else calls them roaches.

In our 100-year-old French house in Haiti, cockroaches were rampant. I used to bring my two pet chickens into the kitchen at night, turn on the light and let the chickens loose. They'd be running and crunching down cockroaches as fast as they could swallow!

We also had huge Norway and Black rats that could run up the wall and go through holes barely big enough for an insect to pass. For them, we collected baby boas from the nest in our radio station ceiling and passed them out to all the houses on the Haiti mission. Just the odor of the snakes kept rats away from our wiring.

Another time, one of the missionary men put out a 5 centime bounty on rats, so after school each day, we'd race to get our Wire-haired Dachsund and hunt rats for extra money..

@birdingnut Sounds like fun, not. Last year I was woken at 3 am with a gnawing sound in my crawl space. I got dressed in my 'crawl space' garb and went hunting. I found where the noise was but not the rat. Days and work went by and I discovered my rat proof space had a minor flaw and an alpha female (why is it always the females that are the smartest?) found her way in and invited some of her friends. I got the friends but she was elusive. I sealed up the entrance but she was trapped. Nothing I could do could entice her to leave.Several weeks of playing games and adding more and more traps went by but no luck. Finally I found her dead and it looked as if she had been poisoned? None of my traps had poison.

@JackPedigo I have no qualms about poisoning rats, but only with rat poison that isn't toxic to other animals. One of them I used to buy affects their hearts only, and only after a few days, so that the other rats don't get suspicious of the bait, and it also dries the dead rats out without them stinking. They say that if you hear or see a rat, there are a hundred you don't see.

@birdingnut There are 2 problems with most rat poisons: ! It usually doesn't kill them right away and if a raptor gets a hold of them the poison is spread. 2. The one I experienced which made me swear off of it; the poison makes them thirsty. If they hear running water they will chew into it. I had a drain chewed in two and ended up with a pool of water in the crawl space. A plumber told me he has seen copper pipes chewed through by thirsty rats.
Such a fun world we live in!

@JackPedigo I used to use an anticoagulant rodenticide, warfarin, which prevents blood clotting. It causes internal bleeding, and effects don't appear for several days, thus doesn't alert the other rats to the danger of the bait. It only affects rodents, so won't kill predator animals.

@GareBear517 My apartment here in Songkhla, Thailand, also has House Geckos, since the sliding doors don't seal, and they can come and go at will. They scamper around the walls, make their weird clicking sounds, get into fights, chase each other, munch on my sprouts, leave their sticky dropping along the bottoms of the walls..gross!

But they're so cute!

@birdingnut Sounds like a fun place?
We have a couple here Chom and Chris. She is from Thailand and they both graduated from UC Berkley with graduate degrees. They recently spent 6 months in Thailand with their kids to get the kids assimilated to the culture. He works with some group which tries to bring off-grid power to areas that are off the beaten path. Mostly Indonesian countries. She is our go-to person for issues with our local power company. They are a dedicated couple and mostly ride their bikes to get around.

@VictoriaNotes Haha! The more liberal sects think it was just a Roach Motel Jesus Cockroach checked into — and he overcame death by checking out on the third day.

@resserts, L L