our new pet, spiderman

i would never have willingly admitted a new pet into our home.

however, soon after arriving home this summer, i wandered into the kitchen for some enjoyable midnight nachos, and as i flicked on the light, my eye caught a flicker of movement.

oh please not a cockroach. i didn't want to wake charles up and i certainly wasn't up to killing it myself. or was i? bravely, i looked at the place where the commotion was, and saw that it was a cute, little gecko, trembling against the wall. LOVE IT! love it even more that it is not a cockroach!

i like gecko's so much that i don't even mind that they do little poos that we have to clean up in the morning. i find it endearing that they lick off sweet bits from lolly sticks or liquid sugar spashes. i give them all sorts of freedoms my own children do not enjoy. the later bedtimes for one thing and the permission to wander around (naked!) in the pantry is another. last night i was rummaging around to throw some sparkling water into the fridge to replace the bottle i had just drained when i saw a little flick of a tail and knew that gecko had either grown (A LOT), or was having, bless him, a party. HE HAS FRIENDS! friends that poop tiny poos also.

part of my love for the geckos is the gratitude that they aren't cockroaches. i just dont like that cockroaches:

- grow their skeleton on the outside of their body and shed it when they outgrow it.

- have a tube shaped heart that can even stop without the cockroach dying

- have white body fat that looks exactly like what my worst fears have imagined my own body fat looks like

- have a brain spread throughout its body, most of it along its belly, which means that if you stomp on the head of a roach, it will still live for as long as one week, eventually dying from starvation or thirst. like i needed that guilt!*

* all this information except the bit about my body fat provided my andrea pheasant, friend, teacher and cockroach expert extraordinaire.

geckos are cute and i love watching them try to maintain their balance when they scamper along the walls. i sometimes try to listen for their suckers pop popping as they move. they are like very cute spiderman, but with better costumes. spiderman leaves messy web behind, geckos leave tiny poos.

last night i left out a warm chocolate chip for my geckos. i am very fond of them.

Comments

[Boulder]

Roaches? Ugh. Experienced enough to last a lifetime in my college town. You know it is bad when you can HEAR them in your room. Some of them were so big they likely had their own gravitational pull.

Geckos? We have lizards here, and have a lovely teeny-tiny one (probably 2-3 inches including full tail) who seems to live on our garage door, as we see it frequently when we pull up to the house.

We often say aloud what we imagine it is thinking when the bright car headlights shine on it and the garage door goes up. "Earthquake!" "What is UP with the neighbor's lights?" "I have GOT to get a new place."

As you can see, we are easily entertained.

[Maureen aka Mo (Grandmother)]

Ahhhhhhhhhh. (As you know, I too am a gecko lover :-)

M xox

[knobody]

love the gecko toes! but you will never actually hear the suckers on their toes as they walk because geckos don't have suckers. that's right, they can walk upside down on smooth glass, but they create no suction. it took scientists years to figure out how they did it. van der waals forces. those weak molecular forces that generally get overlooked are what keep geckos above. their toes are covered with tiny hairs that are also covered with tiny hairs that are...you get the idea. the multi-branching of the hairs creates a huge surface area in a small space, which makes the tiny molecular forces really add up. so, no suckers for geckos.

of course, the best reason to have geckos around? they LOVE bugs. tasty, tasty treats for them. i wish we had geckos here large enough to eat the cockroaches. sadly, med geckos don't get that big.

[polly]

Geckos sound much better than cockroaches indeed. Here and south of us (my dad grew up in Charleston SC USA and has a house there) the roaches grow nearly as big as geckos. Horrible. And even more horrifying now that I know all of these fun facts about roaches. ewwww.

Not sure I will be able to sleep now on our holiday to charleston this year. will tell dad to be sure the exterminator comes the week before I arrive!

[Sister Mel]

We used to hoover the roaches up and just hope they would tie along with the dust. Geckos are magical, just like sea horses

[Sister Mel]

Um, that would be die as opposed to tie. (we tried to tie them up but they always got loose)

[SouthernBell]

LOL! Glad it wasn't a roach.
My hubby wants a dog. Ugh! I'm not a dog-in-the-house kinda girl.

[dad aka Grandad Blake]

One way to solve the tiny poos problem is to fed them cheese monday to saturday then prunes on sunday.

[dad aka Granddad Blake]

Sory. I forgot the most important message...

Love to all....Dad

[Elaine]

Yes, I'm with you on the cute geckos -- it's one of the big pluses of Southeast Asian travel for me. For some reason my latest Bali trip earlier this month was right in the middle of BIG gecko season, and I heard more of them than I ever had before, including one that called outside my window without fail at 6:30 every morning. A gecko alarm clock!

I'm always tempted to smuggle some of the tiny ones back to Japan in my carry-on, but I don't think they'd like the winters here, alas. Maybe global warming will mean the gecko front moves north.

As for cockroaches, don't get me started. My New York apartment was a roach motel, except they kept checking in, and in, and in...