There’s nothing like spending all day cleaning your house then falling out in your pine fresh living room.

I personally like to sit there and continuously inhale and exhale, just to get a fresh whiff of my grand accomplishment.

Sometimes, I even light a few candles to add a vanilla aroma to the kitchen.

This past weekend I did just that. I was enjoying my clean apartment, until I saw that I wasn’t the only one enjoying the immaculateness.

On my way to the bathroom, I found a friend. And it wasn’t the kind of friend you can sit down and talk to, or one that you want to see for that matter.

There it was, a small black critter crawling past my bathroom door. It wasn’t a spider, and I don’t think it was a roach. Come to think of it, I am not sure what it was.

Upon further inspection, before I smashed it with my brown Old Navy flip-flop, I realized the creature had a tiny black body with more than a few legs on each side.

I am sure you native Alabamians have a name for this creature, but as a northern girl, if it’s not a roach, spider, butterfly or ladybug, it doesn’t exist.

Back to the point. This creature must’ve brought some friends with him, because since the first sighting, I’ve found a few more.

There was the one I was forced to smash on my white bathroom wall. Then there was the other one I was forced to squish on my bedroom floor.

For some reason, I haven’t found any of these creatures on the first floor of my home, and they seem to prefer the second level. Which is good, because the kitchen’s on the first floor.

Let’s just all knock on wood before I come home and find them downstairs as well.

Normally I wouldn’t tell anyone if I was under attack by another life form in my home, but I want to know what these little things are.

Maybe they are close cousins to roaches, or maybe they are roaches.

Wait a minute. I know what you are thinking. No, I am not dirty. Matter of fact, I consider myself two steps from being a germaphobe, and I keep things wiped down with the Clorox wipes.

I can’t even eat at a buffet without thinking of who’s been standing over the food before me, and if there are too many people in the place, I have been known to pass on dinner.

I carry a small container of hand sanitizer everywhere I go and I won’t eat outside because I can almost see the microscopic organisms waiting to attack my mouth and my food.

I know it sounds disgusting, but for some reason that’s how I began to think about two years ago.

If I had to choose my personal (opposite of Heaven) it would be Germland, with people coughing and sneezing into the hands and chasing me around.

Then I would close myself in a room, thinking I was safe, only to find nasty little crawly things all over the place.

I know it’s weird because I own a snake and I can’t stand bugs, but everyone has something that makes their skin crawl.

For some folks, it’s snakes, for others it’s birds. For me, it’s most things with more than two legs.