Typhoon season has started! Yesterday, in fact, as Nagoya got the edge of a typhoon blowing up from Kyushu; I woke up in the wee hours of the morning to thunder and unbelievably heavy rain, and the day dawned wet and stayed wet in the form of humidity. However, evening was lovely - an actual cool breeze, I'd say the first I've felt since before the rainy season set in, was blowing, I had a wonderful walk home, and I was thinking "Wow, I actually really like living in Japan! Things are pretty great here!"

Pride goeth before a fall, as always. Not ten minutes later, I discovered, in my bathroom, a cockroach the size of my pointer finger. Black, glossy, moving fast enough to drive me into hysterics: I shut the bathroom door, turned on all the lights in the house, got a weapon (my bathroom slippers, which have a nice hard plastic bottom) and spent two minutes yelling at an empty bathroom to psych myself up to kill this thing. Of course, I couldn't find hide nor hair of it to kill it, and so spent a sleepless night in my loft. This morning, I invested in roach poison and roach spray; I'm sure the thing is long gone, back to whatever hole from whence it came, but the thing about roaches is that they get you psychologically. They're relatively small (although I'm used to dealing with bugs smaller than my thumbnail and this one was easily five times that size), completely harmless, but totally and uncompromisingly gross. And that is what gets you. The threat of Schroedinger's roach is enough to keep me awake, for most of the night, and so I need some weapons on my side to arm me both physically and psychologically.

Of course, this is the first instance of a bug in my house since coming here, so I should be quite thankful - I know teachers who quite literally have to live with them 24/7. The typhoon weather is most likely what drove it inside (having outlasted the rainy season, I find this unfair, but oh well), and I'm guessing it went back out the same way, since today is a wonderful dry, sunny day such as you might find in Canada in June. Here's hoping the next typhoon brings only good weather in its wake, and not any more terrifying insects.