MOSQUITOES!

YAY! I don’t have to go to work until the weekend again. I hope… Everyone’s ill, so you never know. The last thing I did before going home this morning, was to call around in order to find someone who could work the morning shift. Someone who didn’t have sick coming out of both ends… I dragged numerous people out of their warm, cozy beds in order to say something along the lines of “Good morning, how would you feel about coming to work in… oh… say half an hour?” Strangely, nobody jumped at the idea. Go figure.

So where was I? Oh, yeah – the mosquitoes.

Well, as you may or may not have gathered, I was fairly desperate to have a pet when I was a child. It didn’t have to be soft, friendly or particularly lovable. As long as it had some sort of a pulse, that was enough for me. Although, one of our neighbours did have a stuffed beaver that I liked a lot.

Anyway, me and my friends would roam the countryside, armed to the teeth with boxes, jars, bags and whatever else we might possibly catch living creatures in.
At about this time, some people had gotten it into their heads that moving to town would be a clever idea (it wasn’t a lasting idea, but still…). There were quite a few construction sites here and there, and we played in all of them, of course. In one of these sites, we found a large concrete tub-like thing, filled with water. And in the water floated tiny little larva. Perfect pets!
I brought two large jars home with me, stashed them behind the curtains in my room, and immediately started them on the breadcrumb diet that killed so many tadpoles before them.
That summer the house was full of mosquitoes. I remember mum and dad both wondering about where the hell they were coming from (yes, they were so worked up about the mosquitoes, they actually used that word in front of us children. Shock and horror. Hehe). They put nets in all the windows and doors, but the invasion just kept on.
Then, one day, mum was heading past my bedroom door on her way to the kitchen, when she heard a loud buzzing sound. Upon further inspection, she discovered that it was coming from inside my room. Curious, she opened the door – and saw what she later described as a large, brown cloud. She wasn’t to happy about having to fight her way through an angry army of bloodsucking insects in order to open the window. Then, of course, the door to my room had to be completely sealed, so that the buggers couldn’t come through. I had to sleep in my parents room, all of us full of itchy, red bites. It was interesting.

Mouth wide open

Last night, when I was out driving with a friend, we almost hit a frog. Or maybe we did hit the frog. They have no traffic sense in their heads, whatsoever. They’re like demented two-year-olds.
But moving right along… It got me thinking of when I was a kid. Mum would take me and my little sister up into the mountains every year, where we’d park near a large pond. There would always be tadpoles there, and we’d always catch some of them in jars and bring them home. Of course, they would all die relatively quickly. Tadpoles weren’t meant to grow up in jars and live off of bread crumbs, now were they?
Except one year… There was this one little creature, which probably had super-strong genes, or something, that made it all the way into frogginess. I called it Frog (because I was a very inventive child) and it lived in the windowsill, in its little jar.
One day, Frog’s legs had finally become strong enough for it to leap all the way out of its jar. Oh joy. As luck would have it, my grandparents were visiting us at the time, and grandpa was sleeping on the sofa underneath that very window, mouth wide open and snoring like a rabid wildebeest.
Frog braced itself, leaped out of the jar onto the windowsill, and from there it jumped on into freedom – and into my grandfathers open mouth. Easy come, easy go, I guess. Grandpa, who mastered the art of sleeping like no other human being alive, made an odd sort of a snore-gobble-snore sound without even stirring and eyelid. Frog was never seen or heard from again.
What was heard, however, was my grandmother screaming. She’d been awake and had caught the whole show. The screeches she produced upon seeing poor little Frog vanish into grandpa’s open mouth, was enough to wake the dead. It was certainly enough to wake grandpa.

That was the last year that mum took us to catch tadpoles. Of course, if she had just let us have some tadpoles every now and then, she would have avoided that whole mess with the mosquitoes. But that’s a story for next time:)

What is that smell?

Old people make strange smells. They don’t really seem to come from anywhere in particular, but manage fill the air around you completely. The strange thing is that sometimes I can smell it, even after I’ve gone home and had a shower. It’s like my very own, private version of The Sixth Sense:

I smell old people.

Speaking of smells – There’s another odd smell in my bathroom. Kinda like something died. I’m guessing that there might be algae growing in a pipe somewhere, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from. Shouldn’t there be a rule, or something, that smells (especially the stinky ones) should have to come from somewhere. Ideally, they should have some sort of colour, as well. I’d imagine that the bathroom-smell would be a kinda putrid greenish orange. And it would probably look sort of wet and sticky.

Of course, the bathroom-smell is nothing compared to the bedroom-smell from two years ago. It was winter, and a bunch of mice made their way inside. I guess that’s one of the joys of living in a really old house. Anywho, I took someone’s clever advice to use poison. “They’ll eat the poison,” they said. “They’ll crawl outside to die,” they said. Well, they ate the poison, alright. Then they went to meet their maker inside the walls and underneath the floorboard. The smell defied description.
Long story short: I now live in a very old house, with very new floors and walls.

Okay, I’m spending way to much time thinking with my nose here. Time to find something else to do:)