A few weeks ago, as the weather warmed, I started seeing a number of malevolently huge roaches in my apartment, tracking mud across my clean floors and breaking the crockery. "Why can't we have nice things?!?!" I would scream at them. I mean really . . . were they raised in a barn?

The exterminator came, and the past few roaches I have seen have been dead. I decided to leave the first corpse I encountered for Rob to pick up, but I quickly realized the error of my ways when it disappeared and Goblin turned up smacking her chops. "Mmmm, crunchy," she said.

This morning, I found another one. I used approximately ten wadded-up paper towels to pick it up and throw it away, then I washed my hands for five minutes in case any little bit of horror was able to beat its way through ten wadded-up paper towels and infect me.

Beware the Ides of May.