Adjusting

I walked into my room and thought, “Holy Cow, that’s the biggest insect I’ve ever seen,” as what looked like a huge silverfish scampered down the wall. After I realized it was in reality a lizard, I walked to the other room to check how far opened was the window through which the Internet cable was fed, which I figured must have been his port of entry. About a second before my ETA for reaching said window, I saw, hiding behind some furniture (an empty cardboard box is currently my standard furniture unit) the seventh smallest alligator I’d ever seen (I saw half a dozen babies last fall in South Carolina). Then I realized that this six-inch-long, ¾-inch wide amphibious-looking creature was indeed a larger version of what I’d encountered moments ago, or at least some type of cousin.

I find myself thinking like a camper who’s pleasantly surprised every night when he finds that he has a soft (relatively) cushion to lie upon, a pillow, a fan, a locked door, and only a countable number of creatures within his present field of vision right before he closes his eyes for sleep. So what if there’s a lizard I’d need two hands to feel confident fighting – he’s not going to bother me under my net…even though I do sleep on the ground. I can’t even imagine what business he’d have down here. He’s sunning in the light of my fluorescent bulb in the other room, 7 feet up.

I’ve also learned to be a considerate roommate. With so many creatures going in and out on a daily basis (some prefer to come back here at night – actually, most of them…but now that they’re telling their friends about it – we’ll eventually have some day guests, I’m sure), I find that it’s best for all involved if I give a little knock on the kitchen or bathroom door before I enter, just in case the bugs are still reconnoitering the kitchen counter, or, say, the terrible lizard hasn’t yet crawled to a comfortable position behind my water tank - not that the tank currently HAS any water. Apparently there’s some way that I can leave the house without any water running and return with an empty tank and EVEN AN EMPTY TOILET TANK. This lizard is big, but I’m fairly certain he doesn’t flush. I think it has something to do with drainage/leakage/running that occurs when water inundates the usually bone dry municipal pipes for the (up to three, I believe) hours a day that it does. As to the actual mechanism, I’m not sure. But I did wake up the other day, when water was again in the municipal pipes, to the sound of water running out of the tap in my sink, meaning I left the tap open when there was no water, and when water arrived, it just kept on goin’. But an empty toilet tank? What’s up with that?