Michigan J. Cricket

Friday was sort of the lost day of the New Orleans weekend for me; after waking with a jolt at 7:30 am from a nightmare featuring a ghost in the attic of my old house (no doubt inspired by the walking tour the previous night) and failing to fall back asleep for at least an hour, I ended up sleeping until 1 in the afternoon, excluding a couple minutes where I was awakened by housekeeping. With Alma out, I then sat around the room for several hours before it occurred to me to turn my phone on and see where she was (having not brought my charger down, I was aiming to conserve batteries). Eventually we went to see Sharks 3D at the aquarium's Imax theater, which was marginally cool (I don't recall having watched a movie in 3D before), but either I'm remembering Imax screens being much bigger than they are or this was a pretty small Imax screen. Whatever. We ate dinner at the hotel restaurant (again!) and went upstairs.

At some point, I don't remember when exactly, what sounded like a high-pitched electronic chirping started up. It sounded like it might have something to do with the air conditioning, but I played with the settings to no avail. Finally we called the front desk, who promised to send up engineering. Then I went outside briefly to see if it could be coming from the next room (a conference room). When I came back in and the door slammed behind me, the noise suddenly stopped.

Sure enough, the two engineers showed up before the noise started again, making me feel pretty silly. Naturally, not too long after they left, it began again. This time, we took video evidence so that if it stopped before they came back, we would at least have something to show them to prove that we weren't crazy, or pranksters, or crazy pranksters. As they knocked at the door, the noise was still going, but just as I opened the door - of course! - it stopped again. I made a joke to Alma about the singing frog from Looney Tunes (see title of this entry).

At this point we decided to play the video for them, rather than have our sanity called into question. Yes, it was this loud, and this incessant:



Yeah. The noise eventually started up again with the engineers still in the room, and they determined it was a cricket. (Or, they confirmed it, as the front desk and Alma had already suggested it.) My experience with crickets was pretty much limited to the gentle, almost soothing "ee-ee-ee" from outside in the summer, so to have one that sounded like a smoke alarm going off was a bit jarring. Closing the door to the bedroom didn't do much good either. The engineers tried to find the cricket and couldn't; later I tried the same without luck. Eventually he stopped chirping, probably between 12:30 and 1 am, and I was able to get to sleep. But of course I woke up at 8 am to find that he was going again. I considered dragging the table out into the hall because it sounded like he was in it, but after moving it a few feet I realized he was almost certainly in the wall, or at least nowhere portable. Finally I just tried slamming the bedroom door to spook him again, and it managed to work.

Still, a pretty lousy way to cap off Friday, which was certainly the letdown day of the trip already (due mostly to my laziness shenanigans). That's why it was the one I didn't write about before now. But there you have it.