stickin' it to a cricket

So I'm making rice tonight, in a pan that was washed, I think, yesterday or possibly the day before. And I'm boiling the water and cooking the rice and I'm all happy because I'm making rice and then at one point I realize that the rice has got to be done by now so I grab a fork and lift the lid and --

Wait! Some background!

We have these things that I have always called Jerusalem crickets around here - although it's quite possible I was led astray early on in my Tucson experience and they're something else entirely. There's apparently such thing as a Mormon cricket, too. I just know there are jokes to be found here, but I'm incapable, right now, of finding them.

Anyway, these "Jerusalem crickets", as we shall call them out of pure laziness, are ridiculously ugly things, kind of a dirt brown with creepy appendages sticking out everywhere. And I have kind of an inexplicable love/hate relationship with the them. Dare I say, "They're so ugly they're cute?"

I could say it. But it wouldn't be true. Yet still. Maybe it's their personalities. As far as I know, they're utterly harmless to humans. They come in all sizes. The tiny tiny ones are much easier to not freak out about because they really do have this whole cute thing going on. Their appendages are much more difficult to make out in any kind of gory detail.

Every day there is one of these crickets somewhere in the house. Often it's the kitchen sink, but usually it's the bathtub. The ones in the kitchen sink generally don't fare so well because we don't know they're there until we're emptying the strainer and they're all twisted up amongst the nasty food bits. Poor crickets. The other ones usually get rescued because you can pick them up by their antennae. It's creepy, but it can be done.

I also find their dried up corpses in the bottoms of pots and pans that I haven't used in awhile. Like maybe a week. They're apparently curious little critters, these guys. Curious and incredibly oblivious to the danger. All danger.

Anyway, so...

-- holy shit! There's a dead cricket in there! In! The rice! Cooked in the rice! With the appendages! Everywhere! And not the tiny tiny kind! The monster kind! The kind that has been around for like 300 years, and weighs like 800 pounds! The Methuselah of crickets!

I'm not expecting this, so I just about have a heart attack.

It didn't really weigh 800 pounds. There's no way I could've fished it out of the rice with a fork if it did. My forks just aren't that nice. And luckily, I had let the water boil for a little too long and forgotten to check the rice so I would've had to throw it out anyway.

Lucky for me, that is.













Conveniently, there was a largish cricket in the bathtub as I wrote this post.