Bugs

Our most recent bug infestations--we have four going at the moment--are the sugar ants that somehow find our kitchen counter the best place imaginable, the fruit flies that we have tried to trap with not much success, the termites that no longer are okay with just nibbling on our doors and have begun to leave their wings on our kitchen counter, and the lice that we somehow cannot find the end to--we're just about ready to shave everyone's head; mine included!

Below you'll see our most glamorous addition to the bug collection.  The kids ooooohhhh-ed and aaaahhhhhh-ed over it.  Doug thought it was huge and hairy.  I simply said, "Get the camera and snap a picture of it!" A friend here said that these tarantulas are not poisonous.  Like their much smaller cousins, they're actually our friends in that they eat the more pesky creatures around (like roaches, YUCK!).  So we caught a glimpse of her and let her be on her merry way.  Notice how big she is by comparing her size to the chain link fence just above her.  She's crawling up the side of our bodega (storage building).

A couple of nights before, we saw this friend here making his way through the grass.  We find him fascinating and have seen much smaller snails like him.  Since he's not the biting kind, we have never felt threatened by his family making their home in our yard.  Well, that is till yesterday when we found out that snails carry disease and are bad to have around.  So.......we're having to rework our assumptions about creatures.  We apparently have a lot of wrong notions about things.  That's Sethy's hand above it to make a comparison.

We've also seen hummingbirds, more moths and butterflies than you could ever count, geckos, and scores and scores of the most interesting bugs.  Jacobey just commented yesterday that he needs to get a bug collection going.  Amen!  With what he finds here, he could win the Science Fair every year henceforth, hands down.  For example, Selah and I caught this great guy at Casa de Fe.  We saw him hanging on a wall there and had to take him home so we could capture him on film.

(Can you tell that Selah cut her own bangs?)

On another note, we hosted our first bonfire the other night at the end of our driveway.  Since we live off of a dirt road, we were able to pile up our sticks right on the road itself.  We did find it a challenge coming up with enough dry sticks and logs to make this happen though. Since it rains nearly every day, most wood is damp and unusable.  One friend joked that ours was not a bonfire but a woefully small campfire. True but fun nonetheless.

Thankfully friends helped us with finding a larger, dry log to get things going.  And, we all pitched in together to come up with elements for s'mores.  One family contributed the sticks for roasting, then we were able to produce two different packages of marshmallows, some semi-sweet chocolate, and lacking graham crackers, we used little round shortbread cookies.  These are friends from three different families that live near us.

So though we live among the bugs, we are grateful to live among nice humans too. 
Blessings, kim