During the first couple of weeks at my new house I would walk into my bathroom and see a ginormous spider (think tarantula size…seriously). Now I have gotten pretty immune to the bugs and generally take the approach of “if they don’t hurt me I won’t hurt them,” but this spider was just too big for that. So I grabbed the nearest shoe with every intention of smashing it, but as soon as I neared it ran away. I would encounter this spider about once a week and every time I neared it with a shoe in hand it would run away…the thing was really smart & that made me even more determined to kill it because in my mind, a smart spider is much worse that a dumb spider. Then it just stopped showing up. I assumed that it was killed, but I always kept my eyes open for it in case it decided to drop from the ceiling and attack me. But I would let the other bugs go on their way…and there were some interesting bugs…big huge beetles, weird bee-like bugs (that one of my coworkers just told me are good to eat), large and small moths, and ugly cockroaches (I did buy traps for the cockroaches because whenever I saw them I couldn’t help but think of “Men in Black”).
So I would like to say that we had a truce of sorts…I wouldn’t kill them (or most of them) and they wouldn’t bite/sting me. That is until I was stung by the scorpion. After that, it was war. Especially after looking up scorpions in a book about Thailand and glancing at the paragraph right above about beetles that cause rashes. Yep that’s right…the beetles here cause rashes. When they get scared they excrete a toxin that causes rashes (I guess a bit like stink-bugs), but the rash occurs a few hours later so people rarely think that it was the beetle that caused it. The book recommended that if you wake up with a beetle crawling on you that you gently blow it off so as not to scare it (that is the last thing I think of doing when there is a strange bug crawling on me). So I bought a can of Raid with every intention of spraying every insect I encountered.
That is until they started to kill themselves. I think that it must be a part of their life cycle or something, but the other day I was on the phone and all of a sudden I was surrounded by a hoard of moths. They were flying into the light bulb and there were wings everywhere. I just figured that the lizards were eating the moths & just didn’t like the wings (I don’t think I would either…I would think that they would get stuck in your throat…so I didn’t blame them for spitting them out). That is what I THOUGHT was happening…until the next day when I was laying in bed reading a book and I heard this little “plop, plop, plop.” I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until I looked at the floor really closely and noticed that the bodies of the “moths” were falling to the floor & were crawling away.
Now I don’t know why these bugs are doing this, I just know that despite Thai custom where you take off your shoes before entering the house, I have to wear my shoes inside for fear that I will step on some strange bug & get stung (I think just stepping on a strange bug is bad enough). I also “get” to sweep up piles of dead insects (and their wings) every day...
In other news, the rainy season has officially started & I don’t think that I have ever seen it rain this much. It has rained every day for the past two weeks and sometimes it rains all day. (It started raining at 3:00pm on Thursday and did not stop until 10:00pm on Friday). So over the three day weekend (we had another holiday) I got to discover every place my roof leaks, most of which are in the kitchen which I am not too worried about because I have a cement floor. But I am worried about the one in the main part of the house that is right over my bed! (It seems to only leak when it really pours or when it has been raining for a long period of time & I don’t want to move my bed because then I will have to re-hang my mosquito net & that is a pain…so I haven’t decided what I am going to do yet). I hope you all have sweet dreams…may they be nice and dry!
Speed limit…we don’t have no speed limit!
My house
Pic from the wedding I went to last weekend.
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