sometimes ups outnumber the downs

Feb. 24, 2011

Fingers crossed and all other anti-jinx precautions but I think I’ve successfully rid my room of the rats. After months of working to get my windows to close I’ve been able to secure the possible entrances to my room. That is, for now. My room may be rodent free but the house is far from eradicated. They live in the walls, they live in the floor between the downstairs and upstairs, and as of last night I think they finally made it to the ceiling. Like all structures in the Philippines my house has ants and other wood-eating insects. They’ve eaten through the beams creating a perfect entry for rats and mice. At night I can hear them scratching and clawing and gnawing in the walls working their way to the ceiling I guess. Last night they were running and running and running around up there. Victory laps or something. Talk about things that go bump in the night. It was raucous. I just laid in my bed hoping that despite the huge hole the rats chewed into my mosquito net a few weekends ago it would still offer protection if they managed to bust in. For hours they ran and ran and ran. Running into things, knocking things over. It was bedlam. I hated them. I wish I could say I slept poorly, but I just didn’t sleep. They calmed down right about the times the roosters started to crow.

 On Tuesday I was left in charge of things. I had just done a quick lesson on autobiographies for my students and went over the hamburger method of writing paragraphs and they were studiously working. Then all their faces convulsed at once and they started gagging and other like noises. This has happened before, the CR can be smelly. So they dumped some water in and got back to work. But then they did it again. They turned off the fans, and again got back to work. Then they all stood up and were moving around talking in Waray. or rather shouting in Waray. I had no idea what was going on, they could be planning mutiny for all I knew. But it was obvious it was still odor related. They were yelling at each other and pointing and standing. Then this one student, searching for words, told me it was the waste of a dog. Oh I laughed, and laughed. Somebody had stepped in it and the class was in an uproar.

Ahh, the ups and downs of what I’m doing. One fourth of the way in and still very much in love with it.