Shelob & co
This is gross.
We're living in the hospital guesthouse, which has something of a cockroach and ant problem. At any given time, on any surface of any piece of furniture or wall of the house, there will be approximately 16 individual ants crawling across each 10cm square area. Sometimes this area extends to us. I've been bitten LOTS by ants. Any food we eat is inevitably shared with ants - as soon as you put it on the table, they converge like...Mecca pilgrims or January sales seekers. One sad occasion either I or Papia inadvertently stepped on a baby gecko - it died flattened to the ground. Within half an hour the corpse was polished clean off the floor by the hard work of ants. Vultures of the invertebrate world.
The roaches' lair is a pile of old, manky looking boxes that have been in our front room since before we moved in. The boxes contain old patient records - the hospital stores them here. The roaches are well-fed and consequently ginormous. I don't know what they eat, but there's a well-demarkated roach thoroughfare between the box pile and the kitchen; although they've ventured into our bedrooms sometimes, they generally stick to the kitchen garbage can.
Needless to say we're emptying the bin as often as we can and employing vast amounts of insect spray - not to massive effect, unfortunately. There seem to be 5 live ones for every one we manage to kill. Bloody nuclear war survivors. What is the point of cockroaches? Seriously.
Threre are also geckos and harvest spiders - we like these much better than the previous two species. They're entertaining. [There's no TV or radio in the guesthouse. Or internet or much music - we've exhausted the batteries for our mixtapes.]
However - the really gross event happened this morning. The previous night we'd sprayed a cockroach, which had then staggered to the kitchen sink and died there. It was pretty large and disgusting, and we didn't feel up to taking it out of the sink (WE ARE WUSSES, and gross) so we escaped from the house and went to Kilifi Members' Club (local watering hole popular with hosp staff - and great view of the creek, incidentally) for dinner. This morning we slept in. When I got out of bed, I found Pap coming out of the kitchen with a stunned look on her face: "You won't like this. But you have to see it."
Next to the corpse of the roach in the sink, a spider lay upturned. Not a harvest spider, but a fat one with hairy legs and orange abdomen, the end of which contained a pointed horn. We both agreed that it looked like Shelob's stinger. The spider was alive, just unable to right itself. It looked demonic. I'm usually ok with spiders - most of them are benign, and the harvest ones are ok by me because they eat mosquitoes - but this one just exuded evil.
It eventually died. We celebrated by eating pizza at Members.
We're living in the hospital guesthouse, which has something of a cockroach and ant problem. At any given time, on any surface of any piece of furniture or wall of the house, there will be approximately 16 individual ants crawling across each 10cm square area. Sometimes this area extends to us. I've been bitten LOTS by ants. Any food we eat is inevitably shared with ants - as soon as you put it on the table, they converge like...Mecca pilgrims or January sales seekers. One sad occasion either I or Papia inadvertently stepped on a baby gecko - it died flattened to the ground. Within half an hour the corpse was polished clean off the floor by the hard work of ants. Vultures of the invertebrate world.
The roaches' lair is a pile of old, manky looking boxes that have been in our front room since before we moved in. The boxes contain old patient records - the hospital stores them here. The roaches are well-fed and consequently ginormous. I don't know what they eat, but there's a well-demarkated roach thoroughfare between the box pile and the kitchen; although they've ventured into our bedrooms sometimes, they generally stick to the kitchen garbage can.
Needless to say we're emptying the bin as often as we can and employing vast amounts of insect spray - not to massive effect, unfortunately. There seem to be 5 live ones for every one we manage to kill. Bloody nuclear war survivors. What is the point of cockroaches? Seriously.
Threre are also geckos and harvest spiders - we like these much better than the previous two species. They're entertaining. [There's no TV or radio in the guesthouse. Or internet or much music - we've exhausted the batteries for our mixtapes.]
However - the really gross event happened this morning. The previous night we'd sprayed a cockroach, which had then staggered to the kitchen sink and died there. It was pretty large and disgusting, and we didn't feel up to taking it out of the sink (WE ARE WUSSES, and gross) so we escaped from the house and went to Kilifi Members' Club (local watering hole popular with hosp staff - and great view of the creek, incidentally) for dinner. This morning we slept in. When I got out of bed, I found Pap coming out of the kitchen with a stunned look on her face: "You won't like this. But you have to see it."
Next to the corpse of the roach in the sink, a spider lay upturned. Not a harvest spider, but a fat one with hairy legs and orange abdomen, the end of which contained a pointed horn. We both agreed that it looked like Shelob's stinger. The spider was alive, just unable to right itself. It looked demonic. I'm usually ok with spiders - most of them are benign, and the harvest ones are ok by me because they eat mosquitoes - but this one just exuded evil.
It eventually died. We celebrated by eating pizza at Members.