Creepy crawlies.
It’s just barely 6 a.m. and I’ve already added to my count: 1 fat ass spider that had no business running across the dining room floor and scaring the bejeezus out of me while I typed.
It was an easy kill. A hard drop of a notebook from directly overhead followed by a secondary tap over it with my bare foot for good measure. Not particularly satisfying but certainly effective. There will, undoubtedly, be more.
This morning’s spider brings my current tally up to the double digits. More if you count ants, but who counts ants?
In Belgium, I might have let the spider go about its business. Bad luck to kill a spider and all. But there they had been more polite, occasionally getting lost upstairs but usually content to guard the garage/cave for us.
Here? The insects are something else.
I had forgotten that about the tropics. Having left Oahu the summer I was four and living in more temperate climates up until now, I hadn’t remembered just how big the creepy crawlies can get when they don’t have to contend with a winter freeze.
I suppose technically the spider I killed this morning and the flattened tarantula carcass I saw yesterday in the Pricesmart parking lot weren’t actually insects. But I was never that good at taxonomy and, quite frankly, I don’t stop to think about where in the tree the arachnids sit as I’m looking around for something to whack them with.
It’s not just the arthropods. It’s the lizards too (although I’m more likely to give them a pass as long as they’re smaller than my hand). How, exactly, do those sneaky bastards keep getting into the house?
I’m just glad I haven’t yet seen the rats. I’m sure there have to be some given the fact that garbage day seems to float in this neighborhood and the bins have a tendency to get to overflowing and then some. (The neighbor’s gardener told me the trash truck comes on Mondays but I’m not so sure that’s entirely true. The trash truck comes when the trash truck comes. Weekly, at least.) Maybe the cul-de-sacs’ dogs and cats keep the rats at bay. Yes, let’s just go with that…
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I feel the need to go against my own policy and disclaimer this post lest one start to think that all I do is complain: Halloween is coming and I’d so much rather the creepy crawlies than things that go bump in the night. Wouldn’t you?
