average, just average

Question: if you kill ONE THOUSAND flies, will there be any fewer to bother you? I’m beginning to doubt it.

I was sitting (surrounded by flies) in front of a tukul earlier, when a reptilian head with a flickering tongue came peeping around the corner. I jumped far, far into the air. (But I didn’t scream. I am not a screamer.) Snakesnakesnakesnakesnake! Or, as it came sneaking around the corner, not a snake. It was a monitor lizard, one of the big lizards that are supposed to scare snakes away. It retreated around the corner and I followed to look at it. It got one look at the human-sized being coming around the corner and ran, in the fastest waddle I’ve ever seen, back to the tall grasses, leaving me behind, laughing.

I thought I saw a snake earlier, too, when there was a black, red and yellow thing under the step of the office. It turned out to be a large centipede-like bug, with spikes. Doesn’t bite, though, which is all I care about.

Back to sitting in front of the tukul: I had a fan blowing on me for fly-avoidance purposes, and it suddenly made a horrible screeching, scraping noise and the blade fell off inside its cage. I couldn’t help laughing. It was just so… strange. I pried open the cage around the blade, which promptly fell onto the ground. Then I worked out how to piece the thing back together, did so, and tried to put the cage back on. It involved all these clicky things, so I hit it to try to get them to click together. The cage fell apart and onto the floor.

I gave up and trudged off for assistance, trailing bits of fan pathetically across the compound. With teamwork and the hind end of a teaspoon, we eventually got it back together, complete with my colleague’s mutterings about “the cheap crap that [insert name of very very large country east of here, west of the US – YOU KNOW WHICH COUNTRY I MEAN] sells in Africa.”

Actually, the top half falls off this floor fan if you pick it up by the top. The stand stays in place. And when you push the “off” button too hard, it gets wedged inside and you have to pry it out in order to turn the fan back on.

I love stuff like that. Life is so boring when everything works like it’s supposed to work.