Creepy Crawlies

Okay, this is just a rant about the bugs and such here... It's hit me hard this week that there are bugs EVERYWHERE and I'm just a little tired of it. First, we'll start with the spiders. Not only are they all huge, but they have all sorts of poisonous ones everywhere just waiting to jump out at you. We saw a banana spider the first week we were here while out exploring that was the size of a small plate. And the huge one that was in our house. And we had a woman in our branch get bit by a spider they think was just a baby banana spider in October that put her in the hospital for EIGHT days. You leave something on the porch for less than 24 hours and it's got spider webs all over it.
Second, the millipedes. These pictures don't nearly do justice to what was actually there in our entry that night, but there were hundreds of them everywhere. And we always have a few hanging out all around our front door.

And some nights while walking Koji you can see hundreds lining the sidewalks and they just look like those tree droppings. But no, they're millipedes. And they crunch disgustingly when you step on them. They are about an inch long and all over. 

The other night I saw my first centipede. I didn't have any kind of camera on me, but it was while I was walking Koji and it was just scurrying across the sidewalk in it's 5-6 inch glory. 

Last night we got home from picking up a dresser for the baby's room and there were flying bugs ALL over around our parking area. When Garrett came in from running out to the car for one last thing, he must have had almost 10 crawling around on him that we had to pluck off and flush down the toilet. I had one or two on me. Then when we opened the front door to take Koji for his walk later that night tons of the wings from those things just fluttered into my house onto my entry mat. No bodies attached... Talk about eery. 

I haven't seen any snakes yet, but Habu snakes are rampant here on the island and super dangerous. But Garrett thinks he saw something slither when he was mowing our backyard last week. Living on the edge of the jungle the way we do, that's not super surprising. 

I'm not scared of all the bugs(unless the spiders are in my house and huge like the first one) but I'm just a little tired of seeing a hundred bugs every time I step outside. I like Idaho where I didn't see a bug for the four months I lived there. (: 

On a kind of cool note, we also have giant bats. When we walk Koji at night we see them swoop over our heads. I also found a huge one dead next to our tree one morning a while back. 

 This is him. I've always been strangely fascinated with bats ever since we went on a field trip in second grade to the local cave in Clarksville. But I don't know if these bats are doing their job by eating enough bugs. (:

Sorry for the rant. I still love it here. This week was just a little much on the bug front for me.