As a side note to my previous post, we've only been here 2 weeks and we've already become well acquainted with the wildlife. We've yet to see a gator, and I doubt we will until we are being eaten by one. However, there is so much more to see! There are lizards everywhere. At first I was afraid I was going to step on one, because they just run under your feet while you're walking. Somehow, they're always out of the way just before your foot hits the ground. They remind me a lot of quail crossing the street back home.
We've also seen some pretty big, weird birds. There's these black vulture-like birds that eat dead things, all sorts of cranes, and Sean claims to have seen a flamingo fly overhead while we were driving to the beach. We walked out our door one day to see this big blue...something. Again, video the wrong direction, but it appears Blogspot tolerated this one.
My biggest temptation came as I was picking Sean up from his Disney orientation yesterday. I was on a small highway when I noticed a silhouette crossing the street. I thought it was a squirrel (those are also everywhere), but it was moving slowly...much too slowly...
Those who know me know that it took a lot of restraint for me to leave this guy in the wild. The only thing keeping me from bringing him home was the fact that he was over a foot long and that we are too poor to feed another mouth right now. It was funny though, coming to a complete stop to allow a turtle to cross the street.
But then, there are the bugs...While I'm enjoying the bigger things (yes, even the snakes) that we encounter often, I do not appreciate the war the bugs have raged against me. Yes, me. It's very personal. When we first arrived, our condo hadn't been inhabited in awhile, so we ran into a lot of little spiders and other bugs. For days we were smashing spiders and vacuuming corners. And by "We" I mean Sean did the killing while I stood on the couch screaming "Kill him! Kill his family! Destroy everything he loves!" or, "Break his legs off and send him out as a message to his friends!" I am not normally a violent person, but I can be pretty imaginative when it comes to my hatred for Spiders. This is largely thanks to the childhood torments of one Carson Walker, but I won't go there.
We went a few days without any bugs, and trying to keep the house as clean as possible seemed to be helping. Then, just as I was beginning to feel safe, the wild outdoors retaliated by sending in the super soldiers. First, there was the cockroach in the kitchen that kept coming back to life. He was a fast moving bugger and I was not ready with the camera. Then, there was this.
No, it was not the Costa Rica monster of 2006 (Walker family), but was it the biggest spider I've seen outside of a zoo in the United States? Possibly. That's a quarter, not a dime. And we've only been here 2 weeks. Now I lie awake at night jumping at every itch and tickle and wondering what I'm going to if a behemoth like this invades while Sean's at work, and what if it attacks the baby, etc.etc. Sigh. Game on, spiders, game on.
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