By only the light of the hallway, I padded quietly through the bathroom towards the bath-shower. Those beyond the curtain suspected nothing. I paused to grab my weapon and position it carefully in my right hand. Then I threw back the curtain!

It was over in seconds. A few escaped. Most were down the drain. I rinsed the rest off my trusty fly swatter and returned it to the tank top for next time. Then I showered.

I repeated this scene nightly throughout the fall of 2005. Mellower this year, I simply flick pests toward the hot draining water, stunning and flushing them. If another one or two scoot out as I grab the soap, no problem. Yes, I am adjusting.

Cockroaches? That would have been my guess when I first moved in. As I opened the front door one evening, shortly after I moved into this rented house, a two-incher flew into and bounced off my face, skidded across the entry floor, and then skittered off somewhere. Damn! I had already deployed roach motels. A few days later it turned up on a window sill, dead, in my bedroom. Because the nearest house in hundreds of feet away, cockroaches are easily controlled with poison.

Ants? Another good guess. Roaches follow human detritus, but ants like to set up housekeeping, and this brand new house, previously empty for several months before me, was suitable, detritus or no. Ants were harder to dislodge than roaches, but eventually they succumbed to ant motels, except for tiny (about 1 mm) black ants.

A few months after I moved in, I decided to make dough. There was something wrong with the dough blade. The large (10-to-15 cc) cavity, center underside, was the wrong color--dark brown? black?--it appeared to be moving slightly, and tiny ants were milling about. My brain was not equipped to evaluate this scene. After a few seconds, I recognized a molten mass of tiny ants, completely filling the cavity! Had I left food in the dough blade when I packed, months ago? What other disgusting revelations awaited? Flushing the ants down the sink with hot water, I found no food inside. They weren't feeding; they were hanging out. ("Nesting" ) I had stored the blade right side up on a flat melamine surface.

Rivets provided access through a gap of agreeable size. The ants had not anticipated a Brobdingnagian attack. Now I store blades on their sides.

Smaller and less smelly than "odorous house ants", darker than thief and pharaoh ants, the nameless ones (Them? ) don't eat bait that attracts most ants. (No, vegetable oil didn't work either. Give me a break! ) After making a nuisance of themselves all over town and overrunning the local PO (for several weeks I carefully brushed off mail before walking home with it), they left two years ago.

My persistent pests are forky tailies to Scots, earwigs to most of us. This cute European name stems from the legend that earwigs lay eggs in the brain. (Imagine an earwig lurking in a fetid wig, then chewing through the middle ear and into the brain to lay eggs. Or check out the earwig scenes in The Wrath of Khan.) They do indeed like damp, confined spaces. Mean rainfall here is about 1 cm/day. My house is full of confined spaces. Earwig heaven. They especially like the plastic curtain where it meets the tub, the overflow drain, and the damp underside of a soap bar or dirty spoon.

Recently, letting laziness trump good sense, I grabbed a spoon from a cutting board, plunging it into a tub of yoghurt and then into my mouth. My tongue immediately recognized a foreign object. Two seconds later I was washing yet another earwig down the running garbage disposer. (If it's not running, they poke around down there for a while, then re-emerge.) Although rear pincers are reputedly able to inflict what feels like a mild shock, my tongue transmitted no lingering sensation. Perhaps the little guy was too stunned to pinch. Awww.

Between trips to the farmer's market, my Coleman Extreme cooler sits wide open in the carport. Attempts to seal out pests with the lid backfire, because earwigs, small geckos, and other assorted pests stuff themselves into the crack surrounding the seal. No matter how carefully I later pry off the lid, several of these pests jump or fall into the cooler.

Names have power. Water recycling took a big hit in Southern California when someone dubbed it "Toilet-to-tap". I wish we all dubbed my persistent pests "forky tailies." Then I wouldn't mind when the occasional forky wanders a little too close to my bed.