How Things Are Different Here: The Creatures

I am staying in the home of Chad and Jenny, Amy's supervisors, while they're gone for a month.  Paul is still off in Nepal so I'm here by myself, which is mostly fine.  This community has been so safe that people leave doors unlocked with laptops lying around.  And I was rather badly in need of some alone time, having calculated that from the middle of May to well into September, I had maybe an hour of being home alone.

Don't worry, I do miss Paul and will be very happy to see him on Friday evening.

That little balcony up there is a little early-morning taste of Heaven, with morning air that isn't cool, necessarily, but breathable and full of bird chips and twitters.

I go to Amy's house, the equivalent of maybe 2 blocks away, to do email and online stuff, so it tends to not get done, because I have to be organized and intentional rather than impulsive.

Amy and Kimberly's house

Also, Paul has my camera, so to post pictures I have to take them with my phone, email them to myself at Amy's, process them through Picasa on my notebook computer which is all new for me and we all know how quickly I pick up new tech skills.

So, for everyone who has been asking for pictures of motorbike riding, helmet hair, and so on, that's why not many pictures are happening.

A lot of things in Thailand are different from America and especially Oregon.

One is the animals.  Little geckos skitter up the walls just at the corner of my vision.  Last night a toad came hopping along the wall in the kitchen.  I opened the back door and with a dustpan I encouraged it to leave.

This was on the patio one evening.

 I didn't really mind these encounters.  However, yesterday something happened that really bothered me.

Chad and Jenny have a nice office on the ground floor, complete with a rectangular air conditioning unit high up on the wall above the desk.

I had turned only the fan on, since the weather has cooled down somewhat, a turn of events that I greeted with great joy while the rest of Thailand put on their fleece jackets and shivered.

So today I was sitting at the desk efficiently working on emails while the machine above me happily blew.

Suddenly there was a crunching sound in the fan and something dropped down onto the papers in front of me.

It looked very much alive, a nervous little piece of tannish gray flesh that fluttered and shook at one end like a small fish in a very big hurry.

I think it was the back inch and a half of an unfortunate gecko.

It skittered and shook and wiggled and waggled, on and on, over these papers and under those and up against another.

One end was raw and bloody.  The other was skinny and tapered, and it shook violently for probably three minutes.

I was totally traumatized and nauseous.

Finally it stopped.  With great horror I picked up the papers in order to drop the piece of flesh into the garbage can.

The bloody end stuck to the paper. I jerked it a bit. It fell onto the floor.

My stomach turned over in horror and revulsion.

I left for a while to collect myself.  Then I came back with a dustpan and whisk broom, and I encouraged the fragment onto the dustpan, and I rolled it into the garbage.


Dear Lord, have mercy on me.

I'm glad this doesn't happen back home.

Meanwhile, I get to wonder when the rest of the gecko will fall.