I have just been realizing a couple of things I have just shrugged off. I walked into the bathroom and virtually greeted the rat. I am considering naming her! I can’t kill her that I know for sure and now I just do my best to keep her out of the house, but the bathroom is fair game (be sure to cover the soap, she likes to eat it). As the rat slinks off I approach the toilet. Not terribly common, but by no means unusual there is a 4” spider on the wall right next to it. Oh well when you’ve got to go right? So I assumed the position, which would be on the toilet but perched as far to the right as I could. Luckily the spider was not too comfortable with this either and chose to head off to a crack in the wall. Afterwards I headed inside to brush my teeth and as I reached for the toothbrush, there was a cockroach (thanks again for the toothbrush case mom and dad!). The remarkable thing to me is all of these things I basically shrug off and go on with things. After all none of these creatures are dangerous.

If you want to talk dangerous creatures there is really just one, the Molokau. What is this medieval sounding creature you ask? It is a centipede that ranges from 6 to 10 inches long with two stingers on it’s tail. Ewwww! They are creepy and poisonous. I was stung once in Vava’u and immediately began jumping around and screaming in pain before I even knew what happened. Then with a little help from my friend (thanks Jason) I limped to the closest house and sat in the light to examine what happened. There was no noticeable mark where I was stung but the throbbing pain had spread from my toe to my whole foot and was creeping up my leg. By the time we called the nurse and she said to take benadryl the pain had reached my knee (maybe 5-10 minutes). Luckily the benadryl worked and the horrid throbbing lessened, but I was still limping all the way home. Not fun.

The tough part about this is now that the winter solstice is over it is warming up and things are reemerging. I have seen 2 molokau in the last 2 weeks where I haven’t seen one for months before that. One was crawling on the floor right where I was sitting within a foot of my leg. Also the cockroaches are much more prevalent. Basically whatever we have I am seeing more and more frequently.