On this, the last weekend of 2018, please enjoy this crazy cricket story.

Washington Post data reporter Christopher Ingraham shared last night what can only be described as a cautionary tale of what happens when you order crickets online:

So, a shipment of crickets for the lizard arrived via FedEx today. It was my first time ordering bulk crickets off the internet, and I naively assumed that they would be in like, a bag or some other contraption to facilitate easy transfer to another container. They were not.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

They were in a cardboard box. And I cut the tape and opened the box and SURPRISE! Crickets everywhere. It was the middle of the workday and I didn't have time to deal with cricket logistics, so I put the tape back on the box.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

And then I put the box in the upstairs bathroom, the only semi-contained place in the house where I knew the kids and the cats and the dogs wouldn't be able to get at the box and tear it open and unleash 250 hungry crickets into our warm, semi-humid environment.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

About 20 minutes later I'm back at work on my computer, and I hear my wife in the kitchen: "where are these goddamn crickets coming from." I freely admit I had not kept her fully up-to-date on my cricket purchasing plans.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

And at first I was like "okay, maybe one or two got out when I initially opened the box. No biggie." I kept working.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

With the benefit of hindsight, this was a mistake.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

I'm trying to wrap up a story but I keep hearing cricket-related exclamations coming from the kitchen. Eventually I get up to investigate. I say, "So uh the crickets got here toda–"
"I REALIZE THAT," she says. "WHY ARE THEY ALL OVER THE KITCHEN"

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

I say "That's a good question. Let me check something." I walk over to the bathroom. I open the door. There are crickets. Everywhere.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Crickets on the floor. Crickets on the walls. Crickets in the sink. Crickets in the toilet.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

For some reason my first instinct is to flush the toilet, as if that will do anything to solve the problem of crickets in all the other places that were not the toilet. I shut the door. "Uh, don't come in here!" I try to sound cheerful.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Apparently I had not sealed the box shut as well as I should have. I ended up rushing out to the shed, in the 18" of snow and below zero temperatures, to pick up a spare aquarium we had. I spent about 45 minutes collecting crickets from the bathroom.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Of course by this point many had migrated elsewhere. They were in the closet. In the shoes. Making their way downstairs to the playroom. The cats were having what I can only imagine was the greatest day of their lives.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

I tried to collect all of them. It was like the world's shittiest game of Pokemon. But here we are, roughly 10 hours after the initial catastrophe, and stray crickets are still turning up in odd places.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

I make this information public because if I do not send any tweets tomorrow, it is because my wife murdered me after finding a cricket in our bed in the middle of the night.

And that's the news from Red Lake Falls.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

We hope everything has been resolved by now, and certainly think now would be a good time to add “be very careful about one’s crickets” to those New Year’s resolutions.

[image via screengrab]

from Mediaite http://bit.ly/2Ru0n93