Red Monkey: My Roommate

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My Roommate

September 18, 2005

This is just too good to not pass along. My partner's sister is currently teaching English in Turkmenistan (Ashgabat, to be exact) and is staying at the American embassy with a wonderful roommate. I just have to share her latest roommate story with the world.

I�ve been seeing more of my lizard-roommate lately�perhaps that means he�s getting braver. it still makes me start to see him scuttling away, but Friday night was the worst! I walked into the kitchen to make dinner, and I saw him just underneath on of the counters, flicking himself back and forth rapidly. My first thought was, "Oh, no, something bigger is under there eating him!" and I started to worry about snakes, huge spiders, and scorpions. Then he stopped flailing about, so I went closer � and discovered that he was trapped in one of my cockroach-cum-pseudo ant traps. Let me clarify�there are none of the small plastic poison-filled tray ant traps available here. In fact, there doesn�t seem to be anything available to combat ants, and instead I was given some gel-goo that was supposed to get rid of cockroaches�and by get rid of, I apparently mean that it would capture them and hold them fast until they died in a place I could reach to dispose of them � gross!

I digress � so there are 3 hardening globs of this gel at random intervals on my kitchen floor, just under the counters so I don�t step in them, and the lizard was trapped in one. When I bent down to assess the situation, he began to flail again, whipping himself side-to-side as hard as possible even though his back feet were stuck fast, making a noise much akin to that of a rattle snake. Now I�m thinking, "Great, he�s going to die slowly there, and I�ll have to first watch and then pry a his body off of my floor!" I decided to attempt to rescue him � so I covered on hand in a towel in case he tried to bite me or whatever tiny lizards do. Then I used a paper towel to put some warm water on the gel to soften it to the point that he might be able to get out, all the while fearing I�d drown him or mash his hair-like toes as I tried to scoot him out of the mess. Meanwhile, he�s still hissing, but he stopped flailing � probably because I was hurting him. Anyway, it eventually worked, and he ran off.

Now I have no idea what will happen when the gel that is still on his feet re-hardens � I guess I�ll have a lame lizard, probably still slowly dying in some hard-to-reach place, like under the washing machine. I should have trapped him and released him outside, I guess, but I didn�t have the wherewithal to think that far ahead. I suppose I�ll just have to wait and see if I catch sight of him running away over the weekend � ah, good times in Ashgabat!

(And five obscure music points to the first person who names the group who sang a song with the same title as this post!)

Posted by Red Monkey at September 18, 2005 7:33 AM | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | | StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble |