When you’re young and looking forward to moving out of your parents’ house you think about all the wonderful things you’re going to do. You can stay up as late as you’d like, eat ice cream for breakfast, walk around naked, etc. You do not fantasise about the never-ending housework or realising you’re out of clean pants/underwear on the day of a job interview. These sorts of realisations happen fairly early on in living-on-your-owndom.

But there are other things you may not realise are your responsibility for years. Like… fourteen years.

One of those things is that you’ll have to deal with bugs. Sure, you’ll deal with smaller insects and the occasional jumping spider. You’ll grow accustomed to the indigenous creepy-crawlies of your geographic location, but eventually, after you make enough, ‘I’m glad I don’t live in Australia! Everything’s trying to kill them there!’ jokes, Mother Nature says, ‘Oooooh?’ And sends a bug the likes of which you were blissfully unaware existed. A big bug. A bug that wants a nice cuddle in your bed. Where you sleep.

Last Wednesday, a bug of a type we hadn’t seen before appeared on the wall by our front door. This guy:

The next day he was still there. So we took the photo above and showed a friend who knows about these things… She said it looked like an assassin bug, which would eat other bugs.

We were very fine with that. We were going to call him Floyd and high-five him on the way in and out every day.

Unable to find photos online of assassin bugs that looked like good ol’ Nope up there, we did a bit more poking around and it turned out it was a Florida Leaf-footed Bug.

Wikipedia had this to say about our friend:

Pesticides will not get this bug out of a home, so the best means is hand removal….This bug may enter houses when the weather turns colder and likes to make a home for itself in beds.

To recap: They laugh at poisons and want to snuggle with you. The article went on to say the best way to keep them out was by blocking all windows and door frames and such, but, thanks to the fantastic humidity in our part of the world, there’s a small gap at the bottom of our front door juuuust big enough for some bugs to get into. Nope had to go.

I didn’t want to kill the guy-I just wanted him far away from me. If I didn’t have to see him I could pretend he didn’t exist. It’s pretty much the same way I feel about social conservatives. So the plan was to capture him in a paper cup by slipping a bit of card over the top and walk him out to the nearby pine trees, as apparently they like the sap. I know I wouldn’t mind being kidnapped so much if you didn’t harm me and just dropped me off at a nice pub near my house.

The thing about Nope bugs is that they can fly. Did I mention that? They fly, too. What if we try to put the cup over Nope and he flew in our faces? The decision was taken that I’d have two cups and K would have one and the bit of card and if Nope got out of the way of K putting his cup down I could flail around with my cups.

But it turned out he was too high up on the wall. I couldn’t have reached him if I was standing on my tip-toes. My husband is 6’4″, though, so he could reach him fairly easily. He took a second cup in case it was a two-handed job and I held the card at the ready. We psyched each other up and the capture was done quickly.

The next worry was that we’d take the card away from the cup and Nope would be all, ‘WAZZUP! BITCHES!’ in our faces and the entire neighbourhood would see us squeeeeeeing like little girls up the road. To that end, we decided to put the cup down on its side with the bottom of the cup facing us and flip off the card. Then just leave it there like a little driveway to his sweet, new bachelor pad. If it was still there the next day and Nope had moved on the bigger digs, my husband would pick up the cup and card, both of which were paper and biodegradable so no harm done, right?

Kids, when you move out on your own have a plan for big fuck-off bugs. Because they have a plan for you and your comfy, warm bed.