QUEEN OF THE COCKROACHES

(WARNING: Do not read the following blog if your stomach is weak.)

I had planned to make a New Year's Resolution about keeping my house cleaner until I watched "Hoarders: Buried Alive" the other night on television. This was absolutely, hands down, the worst mess I've ever seen on this show--and there have been some doozies.

Living in the squalor was Sherry and her two teenaged children. Dad had gotten fed up and moved out. Sherry's excuse for never throwing away a single piece of trash in probably 10 years or more and just hanging out in an easy chair on the patio all day was that she's diabetic. Therefore, she left all her used insulin needles, hundreds of them, on the floor with the rest of the crap. In the master suite bathroom, she had a three-foot stack of used sanitary napkins, toilet paper, etc. piled in one corner. Lovely. I cannot even begin to describe the toilet stool or the inside of the refrigerator. There are no printable words.

But the worst thing about this house was the uber-infestation of German cockroaches. They were EVERYWHERE!!! A population explosion of magnanimous proportions. Remember the Alfred Hitchcock horror flick THE BIRDS? Well, replace the birds with German cockroaches, and you pretty much have Sherry's house.

When two insect exterminators bravely entered the home to inspect "the problem," which included nests of black widow spiders, they were so freaked out that they called in a Hazardous Materials team for clean-up. Then Sherry became so pissed off when a professional organizer told her the place was a danger to her and her children that she refused to help out ...and lay on her bed pouting while the Haz-Mat'ers worked around her.

Now, I, The Flaming Bore, would have just taken a torch to the place and watched the cockroaches and Sherry go up in flames, but the dear folks trying to come to her rescue worked for six weeks and finally declared it fit for human occupancy.

Aftering uttering, "Oh, my god!" in disbelief over and over again during this program, I've decided to drop the housecleaning resolution. I can live with a little bit of cat fuzz and dust and newspapers spread out on the coffee table. Compared to Sherry, I'm a neat freak! I want to thank The Learning Channel for teaching me that I don't have to waste any extra time trying to keep my house clean. It looks just fine. But if a single German cockroach ever decides to take up residency at Casa de la Flaming Bore, I'm declaring war!