…The Lord God Made Them All

I am sharing my home with no less than 200,000 ants. This morning I had an ant in my ear, and I ate some ants mixed in with my peanut butter for lunch. As we speak, there are probably three or four ants randomly crawling somewhere on my body, and I can count 5 on my desk.

Good thing we have 6 tik-tikis in the house to eat some of the ants. A tik-tiki is a small lizard that eats bugs and makes a tik-tik-tik sound. I’m glad they’re here, actually. Isaac has named some of them. Angel and Hookey live in the TV room, and Harry lives in the bedroom. Not only do they eat ants, but mosquitoes as well.

There is an evil catch-22 involving the mosquitoes here. In order to minimize the number of bites, we have to sleep under a mosquito net. The sad thing about the mosquito net is that it cuts the amount of breeze being generated by the ceiling fan by about 75%. So either you’re cool and get malaria or you are hot and bite free.

They say that spiders eat mosquitoes, too. Well, that’s good, because there is a monster-sized spider in the bathroom behind the mirror. Ok – so it’s only the size of a silver dollar, but it’s hairy and it moves fast. My morning bucket bath was not a peaceful one, because I had to keep one eye on the spider – which I affectionately and spontaneously gave an unrepeatable “nickname”.

Ahhh, bugs and reptiles.