To break up a long afternoon at work yesterday, I took a walk with my coworker in our warehouse.  This is a very regular occurrence as the space is made for walking.  There is actually a loop trail our office mapped out and once around is a half mile.  It’s great exercise and many people here have actually resorted to “walking” meetings when there are less than three or four people involved in a project.  I’ll reiterate.  It’s a very high-traveled path.

However.  Due to the fact that the warehouse serves as storage of furniture and files, houses a gym and mail room and all shipping a receiving works from the area, it also seems to serve as a safe haven for cockroaches.  Rumor has it that many years ago, a delivery of systems-furniture arrived from (of all places) Syracuse, New York.  When the crates of furniture were opened, hundreds, maybe even THOUSANDS of cockroaches spilled out and ran into the deepest, darkest corners of the warehouse to breed.

Every other month now the warehouse is fumigated for these little suckers.  It’s generally some days after the fumigation that you see a few belly up roaches on the cement floors down there.

Today, I’m not sure if something was in the water or the fumigation schedule was ignored or delayed, but there were at least five LIVE cockroaches furiously skittering about the walking route.  The first one I saw made me nearly jump into my coworker’s arms.  She pointed out the second one to me too so I didn’t step on it.  The third and forth were easier to avoid…and scurried into storage areas in the darkness of the hallways.  But the fifth…

I was in the middle of telling an animated story (as per the usual) and stepped on something that popped.  I mean, snap, crackle, POPPED.  I thought at first, it was just a piece of plastic strapping that ended up under my Chuck Ts.  But it was not.  I had my coworker take a look at the bottom of my shoe because I couldn’t bare it.  And then I let out another yelp when she told me I had full-on stepped on a cockroach and killed it.  I considered throwing the shoe in the trash.  But then, I’d have to walk back upstairs to my desk with only one shoe and touch my bare foot to the floor.

Oh lordy, I won’t get over it.  I am still considering throwing the left sneaker in a hot bleach bath.

I thought I came to terms with bugs in South Africa.  I have not.

I’ve been on the road this week with a customer who was visiting from Virginia.  We had business meetings from Colorado Springs to Vail to Cheyenne and Laramie.

Wyoming is one of my favorite western states.

When I was working in Albany, there were two news reporters who had previously worked in Cheyenne.  I would always bother them to tell me Wyoming stories.  I wanted to hear about cowboys and ranches and small town life on the plains.  I wanted to hear about the winds.  Was Wyoming really like how Annie Proulx described it?

Yes.  It is.

It is desolate and wind-swept and covered in sallow, pale winter colors.

And the people are like the land.  Serious and hardened.

One of the women we met with yesterday in Laramie had grown up in Casper, and tried hard to leave it behind for good.  She left as a young woman and was gone for 20 years.  She only returned three times for visits over those two decades.  That’s how much animosity she held in her heart for the place.  And then, as life would have it, her husband lost his job in Washington state and could not find another…except in Denver, where the cost of housing was too high…or Casper, where her parents still lived.  She wanted a house in the country with acres and space to break wild horses auctioned from the Bureau of Land Management.  But what she got was a house in town.  ”I’m bored out of my mind,” she said to us over lunch.

She doesn’t like Laramie any better.

But we liked it for a visit.  We liked that there were big hay trucks driving down Front Street and college students in boots and hats walking to the campus.  We liked that there was a J.C. Penney catalog order storefront.  It’s like a step back in time.  A good one.

Right before we left we stopped at Martindale’s Western Store, one of many western wear stores in town.  We chatted with a salesgirl who called our customer a “rookie” and got her into a Wrangler shirt.

I tried on a few things too, and loved the home town feel of the place.  The dressing rooms were covered with thank-yous from little cowgirls and ranch princesses who’d been sponsored by Martindale’s.

Boy, that Dani Gilgen.  Good advice!

C and I need to plan a trip to Jackson, so we can start our own Wyoming stories.