Larriane Wills a.k.a. Larion Wills

When someone asked me that question my first thought was what a negative attitude. After this last week, I understand the feeling completely. Actually the ‘problem’ started over a year ago. Roaches! Ick! Ugh! Nasty things! And I don’t mean the kind you smoke. Our daughter needed to store some things in our shop. Knowing she came from a roach ‘I don’t care how manytimes you bomb, you ain’t getting rid of me’ area we set out roach motels immediately. I had used them years ago with wonderful results. This time the bugs moved in and set up homes in the little plastic containers. They must have thought them just the right size, because even though they didn’t seem to multiply and didn’t migrate out of the kitchen area they didn’t go away either.I can’t stand roaches. I hate the mess they leave, hate the idea of the diseases they carry, etc, etc. I bombed. After moving myself, the dogs and bird out for the required 3 hours and staying out the additional hour to air the house out, we all moved back in. The roaches had not cooperated by dying or moving out. We sprayed. The funds gagged me; I choked and coughed. The roaches laughed. We keep the galloon sized spray in the kitchen. I turned my head away, stretched my arm out as far as I could, sprayed any roach I saw and ran from the funds. The roaches danced. They were laughing at me I know. I started getting paranoid. They got braver. Open the dishwasher, they ran across the inside of the door. Cooking dinner, they dashed back and forth across the timer, inside the stove. Those suckers had had it. They were laughing at me, I know. We called an exterminator. For us that was a drastic measure. We’d always been able to deal with the filthy things on our own before. The guy came in, a nice young man, gets down on his knee to peer between the stove and counter,under the drawer where I saw them the most, and tells us, you’ll have to empty all the cabinets and drawers. Nice young man or not, my first thought was ‘are you out of you mind?’  My second thought was if I took all that stuff out, wasn’t I taking roaches out with it?I mean I wasn’t going to open every package just to see if one had managed toslide itself in, and I didn’t want to move them from the kitchen to the rest of the house. Sure enough when I unpacked the boxes, ROACHES dashed around the sides and bottoms. Oh, okay, I only saw about three, but they say if you see one, there’s a dozen or so hidden. Told you I had gotten paranoid. I, however, am getting ahead of the story here. I was really thinking ‘why can’t anything be easy’ when I packed box after box, climbed the ladder to reach the back of the top shelves, crawled around on my knees and buried my head in the bottom cabinets to reach the far corners. After all, now that all those cabinets were empty, there was no way I was going to fill them up again without sanitizing. Then there were those things that had some how migrated to the back corners that I pulled out wondering why in the world I’d kept it or when did I get that? Those type of things just had to be sorted out. Boxes full went to Goodwill—and I hoped no roaches went with them. But again, I’m getting ahead of the story. The dogs, bird and I had to move out, but only for the hour it took him to spray and the hour to air the house out. Now all I had to do was put everything back.Right, after I line the shelves again, going up on the ladder, crawling on my knees and burying my head in the cabinets. I got help, my 6’1” grandson to carry boxes in the boxes I had used a dolly to move out, and he brought a friend, a sweet little girl who fit into the cabinets much easier than I did.She got them lined while I decided what was going to go where and what needed to be washed before it did. Love my dishwasher.  So after days of packing, hunting down boxes to pack more,cleaning, unpacking, cleaning more am I roach free? Remember, I said I’d gotten paranoid? The spraying was done five days ago. Today is the first day I haven’tseen at least one roach, dead, sick or healthy and running. Our spray is still in the kitchen. We’ve used it for four days, chasing down those nasty, filthy BUGS!!! The nice young man said if you see more of them after a week, call me back. You better believe it, and I AM NOT GOING TO EMPTY ALL THOSE CABINETSAGAIN!!! I don’t care if I did end up with more room, more organized, easier to use, I am not doing it again.

Now to move onto a positive note, I just signed a contract for my 11th book, 5th in the western collection. White Savage is slated to be released May2011 through Museitup Publishers.  It’s Still Tomorrow, however, has suffered a delay. Some kind of software problem resulting from a computer crash added to a ‘knock me down’ bout with the flu for my publisher. Things haven’t been ‘easy’ for her either, and I don’t think I’d trade places with her. Look for It’s Still Tomorrow in July. No word yet on the release date for The Eternal Search. I’ll let you know on that when I know. And a reminder for this month’s contest; take a jump over to the contest page for details

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