oh yes we get them here to..but nothing compared to FL, I sometimes spot a few around my front door at night but I'm just happy that I've never found one in my house..

like you said..maybe heat plays a big factor in it??

and thank god for the Terminix man..

never had any roaches etc etc (omg touch wood) in any of our houses in all the yrs we've been in Houston but then my pest control man comes every 3 mths and does a great job.

When I first started dating the girl who is now my wife, she lived in an apartment building that housed mostly college students. I guess their standards of cleanliness were somewhat lacking because the entire building was infested with roaches. Her "bed" was a mattress on the floor in a small bedroom in the apartment she shared with two other students. I was awakened many a night by roaches scampering across my face and across my body under the sheets. She hated it, but she was paying her own way through school and it was all she could afford.

Even today, she does not think it's funny when I lightly drag a finger across her face as she sleeps.

Yeah, I was invited to some friend's apartment in SF for dinner once; they were poor students, it was in an 'up and coming' neighborhood, old building, pretty run down ... and there were roaches running around as we ate ...

So how about crickets ...? I LOVE the sound of crickets at night, and associate that sound with "America" - from classic movies, perhaps. I don't recall ever hearing crickets in UK (or 'cicadas' or whatever). Such a cool sound on a warm night with all the windows open!

OMFG...that stuff about the cockroaches is total vomit material...

and we have the Cicadas as well and apparently they do their most spirited singing during the hotter hours of the day..but they're still seriously noisy at night..

I also love the glow worms...me and DD love going outside at dusk and trying to catch them in a jar..

Are glow worms the same as fire flies?

oops...du'h on my part..your right Cindy I meant Fire flies..

DOH! Now I have this song in my head-

http://www.duchessathome.com/childre.../glowworm.html

I don't know if the bite or not but to me the most HORRIFIC looking insect is the "Dobsonfly' the male is slightly more terrifying that the female.

There was one (or something similar) on our deck last week...when it flew off I though if was a dragonfly.

Ugh.

I saw a tarantula while hiking in south Texas.

I am very happy to be in Maine where the worst bugs are the mozzies and the blackflies (defenders of the wilderness)...

I have to say that I don't see more than one cockroach every 3-4 months - we get the outside of the house sprayed regularly and that seems to keep them out. They are hideous - especially coming downstairs first thing in the morning and having to do a sweep around the floors to make sure nothing gruesome is there. There is nothing worse than a half-dead twitching roach - it's so hard to know whether if you try to sweep them up, they'll suddenly spring back into life like zombies in a horror film. All this while trying not to let my son see that I am terrified!
I usually pop a bowl over it, slide it out of the way, and my DH deals with it when he gets back. Nice welcome home present!
When we first moved over, I was so scared there would be brown recluses everywhere (difficult at the time to get it in proportion) that I made a ring of glue traps around our bed and our sons cot, and covered the floors in all of the closets. The guy from the exterminating company was highly entertained. I have him on speed dial!

Didn't you realise spiders don't have to walk on floors...they can use walls and ceilings?

In texas you have heat and humidity and no long cold winter to kill of the bugs.
in MA we had a problem with bugs as soon as summer arrived. we had bugs out side on the deck and waiting to enter your house as soon as you opened the door. It was a huge pain.
Arizona is different.Scorpions can hide between pages in a book we always check our shoes and shake our clothes before putting them on.
Coyotes are also pain taking small pets.

Our house has only ever had ants. our area is only 10 years old and is on the site of an orchard where they must have used lots of pesticides.

The crickets seem to be everywhere and always sing me to sleep after a few beers on the porch

Heh, that reminds me of when I was in dorms and we had a few roaches wandering around. It didn't really bother me that much as there weren't that many of them. What was more worrying was when I would go into the rooms of some of the students that never cleaned, and you would see dead roaches on the floor. It makes you wonder what sort of bacteria they had growing in their rooms that would take out roaches...