ant farm one-by-one

it starts small, the size of an ant

then there is a trail of ants, leading to a faucet or a crumb

then there is nothing

then, one day, a line of ants appears. they march in a dotted line above the door trim, from door, to door, to door. you connect the dots, follow the line from kitchen to hall to other side of hall to hall closet to extra pillows.

some ants are on the pillows. Hmmm.

you move a box or two to try to see where they are going, and suddenly they are covering your arm and planning to hike all over you. you've found it, the ant farm.

Ours was a keyboard box, with an extra and unneeded keyboard stored quietly in the hall closet for about a month. The perfectly round holes in the box must have seemed to the ants like it was built just for them by Frank Lloyd Wright. They had found their mecca.

Too bad the spot they had chosen contained a delete button. Some premonition caused a few of the army use the escape button instead, so we will meet again.

How do you tell one ukulele song from another?

Answer: By the title.

The uke is common here, you can hear kids thrumming on it as they sit around, and for the life of me, the songs do all sound the same.

Until I heard this guy bring the instrument to life:

Rats

We still have rats in our house and my latest encounter was when one was crunching the turkey juice from the bottom of the oven. I went over to the oven with a broom and Jack, opened the door, no rat. I looked in the lower drawer, no rat. I closed everything and put the oven on Clean.
A little later I heard a loud “Bang!” Since it was the wee hours of the morning that this was happening, I turned on the ceiling fan and did the only sane thing I could think of: go back to bed.

The next morning, there was no telling odor or splatter-pattern ashes in the oven, no pile of ashes either. Last night the rat sat and watched me in the easy chair, just staring at me until I’d turn to look at it. David said it was begging for treats.

None of the ladies in the knitting group are eating my potluck baked goods. I even tried telling them that I got stuff at the grocery store, but they won’t touch it. That’ll teach me to tell everything I know.

Millions of Millipedes

I call them curly worms because when you touch them, they roll into a perfect spiral. It is an amazing feature, well designed, and rock solid when you roll them. It makes very little sense in a survival capacity, unless preventing the loss of one of your thousand legs is your highest priority. But not much about these bugs is understandable to me.

Three years ago we had an infestation of millipedes that had me thinking we had bought a house on a bug thoroughfare. I remember Phil howling in frustration at the number of bugs surrounding him in bed and everywhere in the house.

And let me tell you, a thousand legs is tickly. When a millipede climbs into bed with you, you don't really feel it cruising up alongside your leg until it "stands" on tiptoe and kind of taps around like Mr. Magoo trying to find a door... in your leg. It's a friendly knock, not a bite, not malicious in any way. And it's aggravating as heck. Then multiply it. And put it in your hair. And then along your arms, torso, hands, feet...

And multiply it.

For a couple of months now, our carpet has looked like the pacific arena for a millipede flotilla. One night I got up to turn off lights (life with teens) and counted 49 millipedes cruising the floor. They assume the same general trajectory for some reason, and seem to have a plan of attack.

For all their legs, unlike centipedes, they don't race around. Maybe their knees knock or there is a leg-length to body ratio involved here. They smell reminiscent of creosote, and David discovered that some creature (weasels? foxes? I forget) in the wild will rub itself with them to keep mosquitoes away. Well, isn't that good news? We don't have to deal with mosquitoes if we'll just sidle up to our tiny bullet trains on chorus line legs.

In our sleep, we can hear the plink of millipedes who have lost their grip climbing the aluminum sliding door frame, or the glass of the bathroom mirror, or the ceiling.

Each night David gives himself curly worm detail every fifteen minutes or so. He taps the troops to make them curl, then gathers them on a scoop, and hurls them out the door. We both secretly hope that the flight or landing does them in, but can't bring ourselves to actually do the deed. Well, except for flushing them. This provides us with nightmare material since they apparently survive just fine under water and pretty much cruise the commode once tossed in. They signal a thousand tiny shaka while they swim around like, "Yo! Water." We have tried keeping count as David hunts. Each night we stop in the thirties somewhere early in the evening. Who really cares, after all?

What I am hoping is that this too will end. It ended three years ago when I didn't think it would. I know now that it's not local to our house, since our favorite walking trail/street is littered with the remains of roadkill millipedes.

I also remember from three years ago that about a month after relief came from millipedes, we had a series of months that were filled with tiny black flies that got into everything, peppering the sink with black dots. Is this what to expect next?

As I write this, a millipede is cruising the top of the sofa while another just rounded a corner on a seat cushion. One dropped from the ceiling onto our footrest with a thwack, about a foot away from my cup of tea. A millipede aligns itself with the edge of the remote control and then disembarks. Several millipedes were milling around on the floor, and have since disappeared in the vicinity of under my chair. I find myself scratching my head reflexively, then my back. This time, I'm not so sure it will ever end. There are so many of them!

Prop Preparations

I spent this morning in the very heart of the illusion of Hawaii: at one of the upper-end resorts for breakfast.

My dad gave me gift certificates to the place at Christmastime, which I happen to know a friend bought for him because the friend and I chatted about it. Why has it taken me this long to use the gifts, and why did my dad give them away in the first place? Because the resorts are at the heart of the lie about what is paradise.

Breakfast: I ordered lilikoi iced tea (passion fruit juice and tea mixed) and a fresh fruit plate with yogurt. The waitress and waiters were all in their attire, in the attitude of servility, but the illusion was falling apart all around them. Like watching magicians expose themselves, I watched as this resort maintained its smoke and mirrors. First, the tea was foggy (rancid), so I ordered coffee (hey, I'm using gift certificates… and may want to use them up on one trip.) The coffee came French Press style, but I could sense that we were dressing up Maxwell House. Sure enough, it was as I predicted. Just north of Kona, for $8 a cup you cannot buy good coffee.

The fresh fruit plate came, and because of rising fuel expenses, it was (AT LAST!) a combination of fine tropical fruits. Typically the resorts bring in melons, berries, and bananas from Mexico. This time, I got fresh mango, papaya, and pineapple in a generous portion. It's the first sign that the fuel crisis could bring positive change. The fruit plate was supposed to be served with yogurt. My waitress was busy using a plastic bar cup with soapy solution and a toothbrush to scrub off bird and gekko poop from the woven chairs. I interrupted her absorbing work to ask if maybe they were out of yogurt. She came back with a plastic container of Meadow Gold and put it on the table for me with much apology. Nice. And no spoon.

To my left, tree trimmers were dropping fronds with bases wider than the worker's hands, crashing to the ground with a whack as I sat there with other visitors, a few feet away.

Apparently, the sound system had been giving them trouble as well, since a variety of old standby Hawaiian music drifted off and on, in and out of the milieu. At one point, a song about ancient warriors conquering the islands and "what would the Alii think of the islands now?" came into play, and I wondered how it all got this crazy. A song written to question all that presently surrounded me was being used to test a sound system for a Disney production of "Day in Hawaii." My head was spinning.

So, I paid for my $25 fruits, took my leave of the restaurant, and headed for whatever was next. I ended up in a lounge in the same resort, Koa floors and railing surrounding me. The art on the wall was made by a friend and printmaker in town, and I'm sure that many of the elements in the work came from our shop. At last, some sort of human connection came into form. The music playing as ambience, "Kohala", is what I would call Hawaiian massage music. Very mellow and idealistic view-inducing.

I watched as a man stood on a ladder and polished the copper tiki torch housings. As the mowers, weed eaters, and frond shredders whirred outside the elevated and empty lanai, I wondered about what we're polishing. I thought about the illusion. You can't really trick people with a dirty mirror. What are we trying to hide? What do we want to see? Why don't we want to see things as they are?

Welcome to High Maintenance Land

We probably have pretty low crime rates in Hawaii, I don't know the statistics, but if so, I think I know why: nothing lasts here.

With the heat and moisture, everything you might treasure becomes organic in no time. There are the termites for the wood things, the rust for metals (even stainless steel rusts here), moths for the fibers, earthquakes for glass and china, and mold, mildew, rats and mice for everything else. Just try and hang on to something, anything, in the tropics.

Dust to dust.

It's hell, if you have just a few things you want to last for your kids or grandkids. Not an option: everything must go.

Or it's heavenly if you long for an uncluttered existence. Hoarding, storing, and collecting do not pay off. It's a very utilitarian climate with high incentive for keeping things flowing -- today.

how the otherworldly can become normal

I was shocked into a realization of my exotic life by a call from a surveyor last night. The woman calling was clearly from the Sowuth. I pictured tiny flowers on her huge blouse, and tight stretch pants.

Me... I was in the middle of frying sweet potato (putaytuh) chips. I felt an urge to tell her about my day, about how I was standing in my kitchen in a wetsuit from swimming in the ocean just a while before, and how I was headed out to my hammock with my beer in a minute to watch the sun go down. These are my everyday things.

Something about the genteel voice on the other end helped me to realize how far I've sailed from the domesticated creature I once was. And I'm glad of it. If Pele is creative and destructive, my life in her shadow reflects her power by the old me burning away and the new me forming right before my eyes.

Living on fresh rock, some of it only days old and some of it a hundred or so years old, requires new roots from a person.