I'm with a host family now, and the mosquitoes may be a problem. I mean the mosquitoes in my room - not in the common area, of course, as I expect to get munched on while I'm dining, watching TV (emphasis on the "watching", and not necessarily understanding), chatting w/ the fam, etc. Speaking of the family, I believe there are some nine occupants in this house, which brings to mind the Brady Bunch or Hollywood Squares! (You can now safely guess my age. ) But they're never there at the same time, so I can't be entirely sure if the information I've been given is correct. People come and go, eat and watch TV, read the paper and prepare food, play with or (mostly) scold Piash, the brilliant but naughty two-year-old who sits in my lap in the common area or sneaks into my room to mess w/ my stuff. And it's not that I have a lot of stuff there at the house, but having a two-year-old around makes it seem like a lot more!
Anywho, he's given me an idea, that cute little Piash. What I need to do... (hey, did you notice that I used both italics AND bold on the word "need"? Would you like to know why?? I find that italics by itself just doesn't cut it, but adding bold to italics really grabs you!!) So what i need to do is visit each room at 3:00 am and figure out just who really sleeps in that house! And it would even be helpful to figure out who sleeps w/ whom, as I'm still not sure who the marrieds and who the singles are! So I've calculated that this would actually work (to sneak around at 3 in the morning), but the risk of having host family members wake up to a 6'2" white guy slowly opening a creaky door and peering through the mosquito net to see who's in there....well, that might be too much for some of them!! So I'm going to have to continue w/ the current methodology; which, though cumbersome, doesn't lead to any heart attacks.
Ah, mosquito nets...and this was the point I was starting to make. Mosquitoes are numerous and ever-persistent here. They remind me a bit of deodorant or anti-perspirant, only in a negative way. As I climbed into bed last night, I had my little battery-operated lamp with me in order to read some. As I started to read, I noticed a small, black form fly under the lamp. Sure enough, a mosquito had gotten inside the net!! As anyone knows who has ever used a mosquito net, you have to kill that one mosquito or it can surely mess up your whole night's sleep! So I watched it - they're awfully difficult to kill in mid-air - as it flew over to the side of the bed where the net rises towards the ceiling. It found a nice spot to land...in the middle of perhaps TEN other mosquitoes!!! Aughhhhh!
I just spent ten minutes looking up "mosquitos" online because the spell checker at blogspot.com doesn't like it. It prefers "mosquitoes". But two different dictionaries, including the formidable Merriam-Webster, suggest that I can use either one!! So on to the mosquitos... (stupid blogspot)
So then I did a dumb thing, I guess. I still felt like I needed to kill that one little mosquito that had flown under my lamp, so I forcefully whacked the side of the net! Well, I may have gotten him (I don't remember), but all of a sudden I had a swarm inside the net! I was surrounded! So I slipped out of the mosquito net, looking back at it, and wondered how in the world it got its name! More like "Mosquito Apartment Complex where dinner is served nightly at 10 pm"!! I guess they wouldn't sell as many that way, but it would be a major achievement for truthful advertising.
Anyway, I bunched up the net, trapping them all inside, and thought to myself, "Now, how long IS the average life span of a mosquito??" But I figured it would take them at least 24 hours to die, so I turned on the overhead fan (another way to keep the mosquitos at bay), bundled up (it's starting to get pretty cool at night here), and went to sleep!
I just looked up "mosquito life span" on the Internet. I shouldn't have. It's not good (for humans, anyway), and you learn other things about mosquitos that you really didn't want to know! It looks like I may be buying some bug spray on the way home tonight... :(
Larry
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