The thing about being gone from home for long periods of time is that there's always something off-the-wall to deal with upon returning. In my case, it wasn't so much off-the-wall as on-the-ceiling.

When my parents left to get groceries, I thought I heard someone typing on my mom's computer, since its keyboard has a very distinctive sound. I go upstairs to find it on, although no one was on it. However, I was prevented from figuring it out because I noticed this centipede on the ceiling.

I'm used to occasional centipedes, and they are some of the nastiest little critters on the planet. They're fast, they're aggressive, and they're big. This one was rather small and docile, which I found out after trying to trap it in an old pick-a-brick cup. In fact, my attempts to trap it only made it amble really slowly into the corner and tap its legs at me, like it was taunting me.

I try poking at it with the corner of the cup, but it was of no use.

Unfortunately, the way this small little room is laid out, I needed to find some way of flicking it towards me without having it go on me. Otherwise it'd go on a bookshelf (too many nooks and crannies) or one of us would have to go onto the stairs (an unnecessary complication).

So I got resourceful by sticking a mini-bat neatly into one of those cardboard tubes from an old roll of wrapping paper, and I proceeded to whack the wall and ceiling with it in an attempt to get the lazy centipede to move. Nothing worked. I began berating and insulting the invertebrate until I finally poked it hard enough for it to start moving. Figuring that it was on its last legs, I smacked it down onto the floor, where it just bolted for the stairs.

While it wasn't my ideal scenario, there's no way off from the stairs without me, standing there with a mostly-cardboard stick in one hand and a pick-a-brick cup in the other, just staring at possible escape routes from the steps. I waited for what felt like forever when I realized that the thing was probably just sitting there again doing nothing, so I managed to get down to the second and third steps without stepping on the first, which is where things really got interesting.

I couldn't find it.

The small lip on the top of the steps was its hiding place, I knew it—there was no other place it could have gone—but it just wasn't there.

There's no denying it—I panicked. Fearing that the thing had somehow gotten onto me despite my heightened awareness to that possibility, I leapt up the remaining steps in a single bound and took my shirt and pants off, whipping them around above my head and throwing them into adjoining rooms all while trying to sort out where the thing had gone off to.

When my brain returned to normal function, I assessed the situation. Armed with my big stick and cup, although now considerably less clothed, I whacked on the steps as hard as I could ... but the centipede never reappeared.

I checked every inch of the top step and found the tiniest of holes in a corner. With nowhere else to go, I assumed that the centipede went through there and thus plugged the hole with a wad of tissues that I stuffed in with a 5-axle, at which point my parents returned and found my story of the day's proceedings inordinately funny.

The moral of the story: sometimes, you may do everything right and yet still fail miserably.