I stand before you today a stunned man.

For any female readers, this will likely not be much of a stretch to fathom...

However, and more importantly, I am stunned by the karmic consistency of that old saying "what goes around, comes around". After weeks of horsing around about PETA and crickets in these here postings, today my fantasy world collided with the real world.

Walking into my office to blog yet again, coffee in hand, what should I see but a shiny black cricket on the floor, directly in front of my desk.

I may not have written about this topic in these blogs as yet, but I have certainly written a piece in my weekly columns about my distaste for bugs, and even larger displeasure with their removal.

Sorry PETA people, but bugs do not get the benefit of a judge and jury in my house. They will simply and immediately get expedited on to their final resting place, but in a far more compact form than before they had entered my domain...

Hey, it's not all me here!! My wife detests spiders, and I consider it my spousal duty to capture those hairy infiltrators, and give them one last water slide ride down our toilet plumbing system, as they are excommunicated away from her sight...

At any rate, this blasted cricket could not have cared less that I was standing mere feet away, as he sat there crickin' away (or whatever it is that Jiminy's little brothers do to amuse themselves). Even as I circled him to grab two or eight pieces of Kleenex, he remained motionless; probably trying to remember all the words to When You Wish Upon A Star...

(Great, first I foreshadow that I will be hammering in the final nail to my PETA membership aspirations, now I invoke a reference that will bring the Disney People back down on me again...)

For something that had been so still up to that point, it should have been amusing to see how fast he moved as I tried to scoop him up. But seeing a bug rocket along the floor and under your desk has never been a great smile maker in this household...

On my stomach, shining a pocket flashlight into the nether regions of my desk, there stood the little son-of-a-Bulgarian-moosehound - behind a little fortress of dust bunnies.

At this point, the only recourse left was the vacuum, and the extension arm that resolves issues like this, when spiders the size of a tomato are hanging from the ceiling, just out of my reach.

Far more alert than I would usually be on a Sunday morning, I was able to find one free electrical outlet in the basement, that allowed the cord to stretch into my office. Back on my stomach, I swept the vacuum appendage around, with the multiple objective of removing the dust bunnies, loose change & paperclips, and the offensive brother-to-a-grasshopper.

Shining the flashlight under the desk, all of the above had vanished.

For the record, and my tentative friends at PETA, I will be releasing the cricket back into the wild, after my blog is posted... I've been pausing every so often to blow a little air into the vacuum nozzle - he should be just fine...

Chow for now!!