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Saturday, December 3, 2011

The Bug Chain - Part 2 - The Orient

When I became a military spouse, I knew, without a doubt, that my normal was forever going to be changed.  Moving to weird places, accepting that the military would take a front seat in my marriage, and being an emotional Gumbi so that I could flex with every storm were things that I learned early on that I had to accept in order to thrive.

BUT BUGS?????

Man, was I in for it. I thought the mosquitoes in the Great White North were bad!  That was until we moved to the Orient.  I had never seen anything quite like my insectal adversary in the Orient before that move.  What I learned to live with while in the Orient would have sent me into a panic if they showed up in our home anywhere else.

Roaches.  

I mean HUGE roaches!  These nasty, disgusting, vile, little creatures were often 2 to 2 1/2 inches longs AND fat.  They were everywhere and cocky!  The idea that they came out at night was a lie.  They would nonchalantly waltz across the floor like they owned the place.  After a few months, I decided that I had moved into their home and it wasn't really my own.

To say that my engineer and I were absolutely disgusted with the infestation that we moved into doesn't even touch on the depth of nastiness that we felt concerning our home.  We were embarrassed beyond words concerning these repellant creatures that lived in our home.  I would dream of them at night, only to wake in a panic insistent on pulling all the blankets off the bed and shaking them.  I hated getting up in the night for fear of stepping on something.  House shoes became a must.  These gut wrenchingly foul things made my skin crawl.

We also had massive spiders...Wolf Spiders.  At first, these things were the stuff of nightmares: huge, hairy, and fast!  I smashed these invaders with everything I had until I learned from a friend of mine from Italy that they hunted the roaches!  From that moment on, I left 2 or 3 of these mammoth arachnids alone since we had a common enemy: the Roach.

Our roaches came into the house through every possible point of entry: drains, vents, cracks in the walls, under both the front and the back doors, and through the closed windows.  Like every other spouse on that base, I spent most of my life scrubbing our home.  All of our food was stored in the frig and freezer.  Ziplock bags and sealing containers were a must for my sanity concerning my family's food.  Counters scrubbed, stove wiped down, and oven clean, I really didn't have more that I could do.

There was one weapon that we had that I had NEVER considered....

Nutmeg.

Our Nutmeg LOVED our invaders.  With a vengeance, she spent her nights hunting and prowling through the house.  After a while, I made sure that EVERY door and cupboard was left open for her to stalk to her hearts desire.  I became accustomed to the various body parts that I would find in the morning.  Waking early, I tried hard to find them before my Angel could.  I was always able to tell what she was up for snacking on.  Crunchy or Chewy???  Dismemberment was a hobby of hers that made me eternally thankful that I was bigger than she was.  Scary to admit, but I love a sociopath!  Spiders, roaches, flying things...they were no match for her.  A few times I interrupted her entertainment just put the bug out of its misery!

It is sad to say that we actually got acclimated to our buggy situation.  Much like a frog in a pot of progressively heated water, we become numb to it all.  Still persisting in scrubbing the home, seeing a critter scurry by in my peripheral vision no longer sent chills down my spine.  In a sense, I honestly gave up claiming our home to be our own.

By the time we were to pack up, I was more than happy to get rid of the house filled with bugs.  I washed every bit of clothing and linen, bagging and sealing them in the massive Ziplock Storage Bags.  Systematically going through everything we owned, I prayed that whatever hitch hiker might try to join us would die in route.

Our Nutmeg???

Well, let's just say that our lovely lady gained a whopping two pounds during our two year in the Orient.  Concerned for her health, I had spoken to her vet about what I was supposed to do about it.  He smiled and told me that she would lose the extra weight as soon as the "snacks" were no longer in her diet and not to adjust her food.  He closed by saying that we were lucky to have been blessed by such a gifted hunter!


Thursday, December 1, 2011

Peddling My Butt All Over Base

As military, when we are faced with an overseas move, there is always the question of whether to ship the car or not.  When we were looking at moving to the Orient, we thought about the many miles already on our car and continual repairs that it was demanding.  After talking to people who had made the move themselves, we decided to just get rid of it and to use bicycles instead.

Since our HHG (House Hold Goods) were 6 months late, that meant that my own bicycle and trailer didn't arrive until months after we arrived.  Being the stubborn sort of person that I am, my Angel and I hoofed it with the umbrella stroller during that time.

Our daily routine was set by the very fact that there was only so much that I could carry home from the commissary.  We would set out from the house by 8:15 in the morning.  Almost everyday was marked by walks to the commissary to pick up what was needed that I could carry while pushing the stroller.  Finishing our shopping, we would walk to the post office and then head home in time for lunch and naps.  That, everyone, was our morning.

Rain or shine, we walked to the central point of the base to get what was needed.  Honestly, at the time, I dreamt of a day when I could actually buy things for more than 2 days at a time.  While packages sent from family were thrilling, they were also paired with a sense of dread at the thought of carrying them AND the backpack, pushing the stroller laden by my Angel and groceries.

With the rather late arrival of our HHG, came my main mode of transportation.  With excitement, we put me bike and bike trailer together.  Almost gleeful, I remember looking at the trailer and seeing that my Angel could fit in one side of the seat, the soft cooler could fit in the floor, groceries could sit next to her, and groceries could also fit in the boot!  No more daily runs to the store!  Thus began my life of peddling my butt all over base.

While there weren't daily runs to the store anymore, my Angel and I found reasons to go somewhere almost every single day.  Still wanting to beat the heat and humidity of mid day, we would load up in the morning and head to the post office every morning.  After a while, new faces became familiar faces.  A lot of the base populace used bicycles for their main mode of transportation.  So, after a while, much as I would recognize someone's car, I began knowing if people I knew were there by whether or not their bicycles were in the rack.

While you are reading this, you may be having thoughts of how "novel" this was.  It is novel until you are pulling a trailer with about 100 pounds in it and the heat index has hit 105F. By the middle of summer, my engineer and I had invested in a Camelbak each, with hopes that using them would fight off heat exhaustion.  Late spring, summer, and early fall were marked with sweat soaked clothing and much sprawling on the living room floor after cycling all up hill in order to get home.

We absolutely rode our bikes to death during that tour.  While we made routine repairs and fixes when needed, we decided six months before leaving the Orient that the bikes would be staying there.  If we had spent a lot of money on them, we probably would have taken them with us and dropped them of at a bicycle repair shop.  However, feeling that they had served to their fullest, when we boarded the plane, we bid them goodbye.


The Diabetic Cat

We had three sets of neighbors during our short two years in the Orient.  Neighbors can be very, very fun.  Either they ACTUALLY are fun, or they are highly entertaining to watch, much like animals in a zoo or a diorama in a natural history museum.  I have had some very entertaining neighbors through the years.  Some I have grown to love like family while others? Let's just say it was a good thing entertainment value entered the equation.

All that being said, I genuinely liked our first set of neighbors.  They were a vibrant couple with multiple children, a dog, and a diabetic cat.  While I was amazed at the chaotic menagerie that lived next door, I was most taken by their poor, decrepit, diabetic cat.

Oh, this cat was a daily fixture in my life.  She was white & fluffy, with fur that told of her ill health.  I have a feeling that she was once a medium, robust cat when she was in her prime.  But by the time I met her, she had dwindled down to fur and bones.

One day, I had made the major mistake of petting her.  If I had known what that would bring in the following 12 months, I wouldn't have done it.  It was almost as if, in her own addled mind, I became one of her "parents."

Every day, after that first "introduction," she would hang out in our front yard and in our carport.  At first I thought she was honestly exploring.  But then I saw that every single day, she would be waiting for me by our front door.  To say that our Nutmeg was jumping around the front window like a monkey in a cage is putting it lightly.  If our Nutmeg could talk, she would have been saying, "Just let me at her!!  I could take her down!  Just let me do it!"

Because of Nutmeg's strong desire to kill this interloper, I had a serious battle every time I wanted to enter my own house.  My Angel would be wanting to make a break for it, my arms would be laden by groceries, the poor delusional cat would be trying to get in, while my Nutmeg would be fighting to get out to kill her.  This daily battle got really old, really fast.

Things got worse when our neighbor's spouse got into a doctoral program in the States.  Since he was ERDing (early return of dependents) his wife and children back to the States, he had to move to a smaller home located in our little portion of the street.  With that came absolute confusion to this already perplexed cat.

Now, since no one at all answered her old door, and she couldn't find her new one, she was convinced that our door was her only option.  Some of you are probably asking why we didn't just take her in.  Honestly, I wasn't up for paying out the nose for her medication and giving her shots twice a day on top of that.  Nutmeg we loved and this poor thing had a family...she just couldn't remember where she put them.

I have no idea how many time I picked up her frail little frame and carefully took her back to her home.  While she may have been a bit baffling at the time, she is a firm fixture in our memories swirling around the Orient.  I will never forget the concern I felt when I noticed, one day months after first meeting her, that she wasn't at our door.  Keeping my eyes open for her, I never saw her again.  One day, walking through the front door after a long day at work, my engineer told me that her "dad" had gone ahead and put her to sleep. A sense of peace was there as I said, "while she won't be meeting me at the door anymore, she is much better now."


 
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