Getting Antsy

There are quite a few creatures in Grenada. We've seen a number of them so far; I'm hoping to see more by the time we leave (like the mysterious monkeys at monkey point). Some I am sure we will never see, but we are very aware that they exist. Others we will see a lot, but will have trouble believing they exist. And of course, there are those that we won't see and hope don't exist. Those last ones are probably the ones we will worry about the most.

Many a lizard runs amok. Sometimes they are on your doorstep. Sometimes they are on the inside of your door. They're actually pretty neat little creatures. The majority of them are blue and green. I haven't figured out their particular breed(?) yet. At our quick dip beach they are always sunning on a concrete wall. There are a bunch of small caverns that I assume are made by the lizards. Sometimes I think something that doesn't exist might be in there though. I'm not daring enough to stick my head in and look. I bet it’s Tremors.

Many normally domesticated animals are about too. On the bus route to campus it is fairly common to see the odd goat or cow meandering through the bushes on the side of the road. I feel like these animals must be very lost or confused. I figured them both to be grazers, not bush whackers. Somewhere along the way they must have forgotten their life purpose or decided that they were a much more rugged creature stuck in a cow or goat's body. There are also the stray dogs, and the not so stray dogs that we often see. Someone carries kibble in her purse, so naturally, no dog's affection discriminates. At the beach just the other day we made friends with some dogs that like to eat. From then on they would bark at anyone that came near us. They became so quickly attached to us I felt a little bad that we ran from the beach as soon as they turned away to pee on a tree. *Don't sit under the tree near the fence of where the hotel starts. It smells like pee.

You'll find a vast variety of insects here. This is pretty well expected when you come the Caribbean. I would say there are about as many mosquitos per person as there are hairs. The worst time is the evening. I may have a receding hairline, and bubble at the thought of the Sun, but at least the mosquitos don't have the same love for me as they do others. The other person in the room is constantly itching but is golden like a graham wafer and has a nice thick coiffure. Take your pick. Other insects include these really tiny, basically translucent, ants. They'll swarm anything you leave out on the counter. Having to constantly wipe up immediately seems to be instilling some good habits though.

And lastly there are many a creature we haven't seen, but they sure make their presence known. At night we hear the constant buzz from whatever that thing is and the cooing of something else. Actually, I might have any idea what the buzz is coming from. On our hike up Grand Etang I saw a moth gyrating it's bum to generate the noise. All I can think of now is a thousand gyrating bums in the moonlight. At least knowing what the noise is gives you peace of mind.

I mentioned a post or two ago about our visitors. We had the place sprayed to keep them out. It doesn't work so well with the guy who wants our water nuts—he came back. The spray worked otherwise, we thought. After dawn I had discovered a few expired visitors. The other day I found two in one day and then I decided to have a shower. This is when I heard chirping from beneath my feet. As far as I know, this is not atypical. I should preface this with, a couple days prior we cleaned the bathroom; in the grout of the tile wriggled out a thin earthworm (I hope). Needless to say, the previous worm, and now this noise irked me. As it turns out, according to Google, visitors make either a hissing noise, or a chirping noise depending on type. My discovery, and then my Googling, all took place while she was at class. I was not so careful with the terms I used when I described our problem to her as I have been here. That being said, she'd been in class all day, studied for countless hours, and I decided to reward us both with a light movie before bed called Alien Resurrection. We slept very little and paranoia was set in a bit more in one of us than the other. This lasted two nights; but we slept easier the second night regardless of the fact that the chirping had persisted and our imaginations grew wilder. The chirp itself sounded cute, but the implications seemed dismal. We began to believe that any living creature in this post, save for maybe the goat or cow, might be living under our tub along with all the creepy crawlies. Today we were to have the underside of the bath sprayed. I peeled back the 'door' of the tub and saw something half the size of my pinky hop away. Our cohabitants are frogs. That has put at us much more at ease, for what reason, I don't know. We're sorry to say that we are hoping to evict chirpy Kermit and his family; I hope they find a nice puddle beyond the orange tree.