Authentic Puerto Rican wildlife

I'm no longer fighting the war on ants. They're the little sugar ants, "Crazy ants," the ones that will take anything but a straight path on a flat surface, that invaded my kitchen a long, long time ago. I've seen them on my dishes so many times that, not only do I no longer care about them being on my dishes, I'm no longer disturbed by the possibility that I am regularly eating many, many of them. They win, man.

They win.

There's an enormous dead cockroach sitting underneath my table in my kitchen. It's lying on its back with its legs up in the air, just like the "Dead Bug" we used to do at roller skating parties. I noticed it the other day. You're supposed to handle these sorts of things immediately, I think. But in my defense, it's kind of tucked back in a corner, out of the way, not harming anything. It's slowly getting buried by dust bunnies. I would need a broom to get at it.

It's still there.

I left a loaf of bread out on my counter. I prefer not to put it in the fridge because it quickly firms up and gets kinda stale. So today at lunch, I went home to make myself a sandwich. Got out the turkey. The mustard. A head of lettuce. Some peppers. Went for the bread: Found a gaping hole in the plastic bag, where some mouse-like creature with mouse-like teeth had chewed through. He also carved himself - ya know, I shouldn't assume he's male, females are generally just as capable of such atrocities - a cave in the bread. I hope he liked it. This wasn't no bottom-shelf bread. This was top-shelf whole-wheat 9-grain stuff.

It was good bread.

Today I saw Dani (a golden retriever/lots of other things I think mix) running in front of the comedor with a large iguana in her mouth. Right as a group of girl scouts arrived for the weekend, she ran in front of them and dropped it on the sidewalk, dead, missing most of its tail, lying on its belly with its big hind legs splayed back like a frog mid-swim. Julio took it and buried it.

It was big.

There's a pair of Puerto Rican parrots nesting in the trees between the staff housing and Dorm B. They're rare and endangered, so I hear. Critically endangered. So I better not make any parrot-eggs-for-breakfast jokes. What little research I did since starting to write this paragraph leads me to believe that these are, indeed, the same parrots, not boring less-endangered ones. Puerto Rico, it seems, doesn't have any other parrots. Just those. And those are parrots. And they look the same. They squawk a lot. But, as I have demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs, I typically leave wildlife alone.

So they're safe from me.