Jimbo: The Adventure

Cleaning. It's something we all have to do at one point or another. If you live in a house with 7 other girls, it's something that you have to do a lot... particularly because most of those girls don't. It's easy to ignore chores when there's so many other things to do such as hanging with friends or getting homework done or going to class.

On top of the general lack of motivation to clean, there's Rush. Formal Recruitment. The week where we have to put on our best and worry ourselves to death over who may be joining our sorority. During this week the house, for lack of a better term, exploded. Decorations and food were stored haphazardly, traded out every other night... and the basement became even more of an unorganized, grungy storage area than anything. It was almost impossible to walk through the basement to get to the washer and dryer to do laundry!

But Rush is over now-- it has been for about two weeks. Tonight I got back from dinner and continued doing my laundry, and in trying to traverse the narrow, dirty walkway to get to the washer and dryer, I decided I was sick of it. The whole place was filthy, and while there was no way I was going to clean all of it, I thought I could at least pick up bits of trash floating around. In the process I moved some of the boxes around down there, making the ally wider. There was dirt and some dead leaves from the fall down there (there's a door up one of the two sets of stairs that go down to the basement; it exits out the side of the house and is convenient for trash). It was ridiculous, honestly, and I was tired of stepping over it all.

So I went back upstairs to get a dustpan and a broom, and what is waiting for me down there, in plain sight, but what I would later learn is a camel cricket.
This picture actually shows an adult of the species, where the one I found was in fact a nymph-- its body wasn't as big. It was still pretty large, though-- at least the size of a silver dollar in circumference (with the legs). At first I thought it was a huge spider, but I noted it had six legs, not eight. The two 'jumpy' legs in the back lead my mind to a cricket, though I'd never seen one of these things before.

Now, I was the only one at the house at the time-- that happens around 6pm on a Saturday. So after staring at it for a few moments, and seeing that it wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, I hurried back upstairs and grabbed a plastic cup and a sheet of paper. Much prodding later, I had the cricket, who I decided to call Jimbo, safe and secure in the cup. He seemed a bit disgruntled, and I imagine rather confused, but overall he seemed harmless. Just really big. And... spindley.

After toying with the idea of keeping Jimbo for display to my sorority sisters later (that would teach them to clean-- but the picture above will suffice), I decided to just take him outside and toss him into the grass-- except there's no grass outside at the moment, simply snow. So I walked (in a t-shirt and socks) out to the nearest tree and tossed him into the snow there. It was kind of dark, but last I saw he hadn't moved, probably trying to deal with the harsh temperature.

Such is the tragedy of Jimbo-- I do hope he found a warm place to reside. I just hope it wasn't our basement.