COCKroach Blocking (Apologies This Wasn't A More Creative Title)

Of all the various mental breakdown stimuli that have caused me to gnash my teeth at the sky like Grendel and cry out I'M A HUMAN DISASTERRRRRRRRRR,

the cockroaches had to be one of the worst.  While I appreciate this landlord's absenteeism to a certain extent, and prefer it to the "hiding behind a van" involvement of prior socially unstable landowners, he is still kind of a slumlord, if a more genteel slumlord (I later found out, from my neighbor who looks like Fat Joe, that my landlord used to also own the building next door, and that he didn't maintain it and eventually they sued and the building was taken away from him?).

So we wrote businesswoman-like emails, we called the super multiple times, and we wrote follow-up businesswoman-like emails.  Out of all the calls, the super came twice and put some tiny, ineffective traps down, and the landlord provided only this Hemingway-esque response:

"Please call andrew [the super] who will take care of it. Boric acid, available in the hardware store, is totally effective against them- but don't leave any food or unclean dishes around."

Valid.  But we weren't leaving food or unclean dishes out, the cockroaches were even going inside the dishwasher, and Andrew was not taking care of it.  When I asked Andrew for an exterminator after two of his visits without continued improvement, he said he was going to have someone come, and then called me to ask if someone was going to be home to give him cash?  This, of course, being suspect, I declined his request, and he said he would figure it out.  He did not.

Result: Leah and I realized we had to address this ourselves.  We researched boric acid and learned that it is non-toxic to humans or pets, and that it destroys the cockroach's exoskeleton as well as their insides, if they ingest it.  The nerd boyfriend got involved and learned that whatever poisoning method used will "work its way through the population," which is super gross because this is achieved by the cockroaches eating other cockroaches.  TMI, amirite ladies?

Our apartment's layout is sort of box-like.  You enter in the kitchen, whose windows face south, and to the left is the bathroom, whose windows also face south.  Behind the kitchen is a windowless living room, and behind that are two bedrooms that face north.  The cockroaches' chill spot was the southwest corner of the kitchen near the sink, oven, and dishwasher, and they never ventured beyond the kitchen.  So Leah lined the back of the kitchen counters with boric acid, and we waited.

Some dead cockroaches turned up, and they seemed to be momentarily slowed.  But then, we'd use the oven or something, and they'd pop out and I'd have a complete mental breakdown and comfort myself with the Rossi.

And then it happened- I found one in my room.

Rationally, I knew the cockroaches were migrating because they were trying to avoid the poisonous trap we'd laid for them.  Emotionally, I completely lost my shit.  I went to Home Depot that night in a rage, spent like twenty minutes talking to an employee looking for something Leah had used in LA that she only knew as "the peanut butter stuff," and I bought a large tube of it and what seemed to be a more chemical-laden boric acid the Home Depot employee called "the blue stuff."  I didn't want to violate environmental principles that have a sound, reasonable basis, but this was a clear quality of life issue that I just couldn't put up with.

As it turns out, I didn't have to.  Behold The Peanut Butter Stuff:

That font tells you everything you need to know: bitches were going down.  I used my Herculean rage strength to pull the refrigerator out, cleaned underneath it, and squirted the thin brown, somewhat peanut butter-like strings liberally about.  I drew a line right underneath the oven on the floor and by the heater. (I blocked the areas off with tape in case Donut was interested, but he only eats organic so he hasn't been tempted.)

This represented a two-fold approach, depending on zone.  On the countertops, where we wanted to repel the roaches, we'd applied a powdery insecticide.  In out of the way places, we applied delicious fake harbinger of their doom peanut butter that would kill them from the inside and also their families would die too because they have no respect for authority figures and they lack a traditional burial culture.  

And they went for it.  YA BURNT, ROACHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

While the bait is, I'm sure, environmentally questionable, the amount we used and the spots we put it in tend to limit the amount of toxic danger Leah, Donut, and nerd boyfriends faced, and I didn't end up having to resort to the blue stuff.  And in my opinion, it was much more painless than fumigating, since we would have had to remove all of our dishes and food from the kitchen (I'm getting a panic attack just thinking about the level of effort that would entail).  We still see an occasional roach (in case anyone's wondering, it's the small roaches- not like the terrifying ones I imagine are in LA), but after we applied the Combat it declined dramatically.  Should you find yourself in our sad girl roach killing position, I heartily recommend it.