My home city of Melbourne and Australia's best known city Sydney are rather different, at times even with words.
If I was in Sydney and I said I stomped on a cocky and killed it, I would be praised.
In Melbourne if I said a stomped on a cocky and killed it, I would be a social pariah and probably charged by police for my act.
Sydney cocky.
Melbourne cocky.
And just to confuse things, there are cowcockies. I can't imagine the origins of this phrase but it refers to dairy farmers. NB, he looks more like a beef farmer but you get the idea.
Apparently we had a very warm winter last year. You could have fooled me. We certainly had a very wet spring and mid summer, and it was an ideal climate for crickets to breed.
I didn't shriek, but I did rush inside and tell R a cockroach had run across our balcony. A few days later I heard about the cricket pestilence. They had bred in high numbers and were everywhere. With my new found knowledge I calmed R down when he fled his bathroom after his morning shower, saying there was a cockroach in there. With a bit of carboard and an empty yoghurt container from the recycling bin, I removed the cricket, chucked it off the balcony and it fell down then flew away.
Another ran across in front of us in the foyer when we going out one day this week.
At 5.30 in the morning one day last week I was woken by a very loud cricket. I was convinced it was in my bedroom. I pulled apart the nest of tables at my minor bedroom window and I couldn't find it. In spite of our very thick window glass, I suspect it might have been on the outside window ledge. Enough to wake me at 5.30, it must have been loud. I did go back to sleep.
We have resident cricket under our balcony air con unit and today after we traced another cricket sound, found it is one is living in the bulkhead of our living room, where the various bathroom, toilet and range hood ducts go to the outside.
Living high up off the ground, we don't see too many pest critters. In about 2004 we had an ant invasion that thought my hair removal wax was very tasty. A few years later what is now perhaps a threatened species, we had an invasion of Bogong moths. We rarely get flies inside.
Google tells me crickets live to an age of eight to ten weeks, or a year or more. Maybe it depends on the cricket species.