My greatest fears realized

Okay, I'm exaggerating again.

I had two major fears about coming to India and they may seem trivial because they kind of are.  Those fears were of paralyzing heat and bugs.  Part of the reason these were my topmost fears is that I didn't think there was much I could to do about them and I can't see getting anything in return for coping with them.  Running away to another country without a job or anything?  Scary, or wildly irresponsible, but I get to live  in India!  Witnessing incredible poverty, animals that aren't cared for and whathaveyou?  Hard, but character building, right?  Plus sometimes I get to help and that is awesome.

So I was scared of bugs and heat.  The heat has turned out to be bearable.  It affects my activities, but I'm not dying or anything.  I don't think I've even seen a cockroach.  If I am particularly brutalized by mosquitoes in a short period of time, I do go a little whacko.  That's mostly unfortunate for Boaz.  The spiders are especially scary because they all jump, but there aren't a lot of them.

There weren't a lot of them.



A few days ago I discovered hundreds of baby spiders in the kitchen.  They seemed to be pouring out of one of the lower cabinets, spreading across my counters and my floor.  I don't have pictures because I freaked out and immediately flooded half my kitchen with soapy water.  I did this several times over.  Basically whenever I wasn't frantically brushing imaginary bugs off every part of my body, I was flooding some part of the kitchen.

It turned out these were not spiders though.  These were tiny, light colored ants of some kind.  They even drove away the old regime of ants.  I had managed a sort of livable stalemate with them.  The old ants didn't arrive in force and they stayed off the counter - at least while I was in the room.  Mostly they spent their time relearning that they have to cut the dead bug into smaller pieces before it will fit out the crack in the window sill.  I could live with that.  These new ants had no respect for my sanity.

I purged the house of all sugar.  I had the maid scrub all the cabinets.  I have been on a killing/cleaning campaign for days.  The little ants (or whatever they are, they are really darn tiny) are almost gone and the old ants are starting to come back.  I'm not sure they will be tolerated this time around.  I think I have exceeded my bug tolerance threshold for like the next decade.