I Just Can't Help It...

It's another spider blog. I know, it seems like my whole life revolves around insects and dogs.

I was totally looking forward to coming home to Colorado where it is too cold and too dry for many bugs to survive. There aren't dinner-plate sized spiders here, invisible mosquitoes, or mutant roaches that just won't die. But! In my absence, the spiders seem to have launched an invasion of my room in my parent's house. I have killed a spider almost every day since I have been home. I have a rule that spiders are not allowed in the vicinity of my bedroom. In Colorado, that means they die if they enter my room, my bathroom, or hover too close in the hallway. In Japan, that rule pretty much extends to the entire apartment. The apartment is small enough and the spiders are big enough that I feel threatened even if they are at the far end of the living room. My rule was justified the other day when I went to say goodnight to my mom and found a spider crawling across her in bed. I rescued her, and then doubled my efforts to keep my own room spider free.

I can't remember if I've mentioned Japanese mosquitoes before. They're tiny little things...so tiny that they're hardly noticable until well after they're gone. But I am apparently much more allergic to their bites than I am to American mosquito bites. I get huge welts and tend to look like a victim of abuse for weeks afterwards. In Colorado, my parents live high enough that there aren't many mosquitoes. I must be tasty though, because at least two of them found me. Now one of them is dead. The other should probably be put on the endangered species list, because I doubt there are more than two living at this altitude.

Speaking of altitude, I spent the weekend up on top of a mountain near Rocky Mountain National Park. Our friend Meg has a cabin up there and I went up to help give it a fresh coat of paint. I felt like I owed the cabin a little TLC since that's the place where Peter proposed. It is a small log cabin that the family built by hand. Here is a photo of the view at the cabin (unfortunately I couldn't find any photos of the cabin itself because I'm always standing on the porch when I take photos - I'll keep looking and update later if I find one):


It is rustic enough that the only bathroom facilities are an outhouse behind it. I have no problems with the outhouse, however Meg likes to tell a story about the time she went to the bathroom and discovered a packrat living behind the toilet. It was dark, and she "discovered" the rat when it startled and came flying out of the outhouse at her. After hearing that story, I always approach the outhouse with caution. Especially at night. I make a lot of noise and bang the side before opening the door. Well Saturday night I made my usual rukus and then opened the door to see legs disappearing under the toilet seat. My first thought was "dinner plate spider!" and my second thought was "mutant cockroach!" Even after I remembered that Colorado bugs are much smaller than Japanese bugs, there was no way I was going to use the facilities with an unknown insect lurking under the toilet seat. So I took the toilet seat off and chased the bug around the outhouse. It was a cricket. I won.

Enough about bugs already!! I'll write more soon!