Ahhgh! Slugs!

Today I write about some of the weird/creepy things about living here. So far the honeymoon has lasted three weeks, but that fourth week is when you really start to notice your surroundings for what they are: good and bad. So far, not so bad.

Let's see...we live at the end of a street surrounded by city property full of giant trees, grasses, birds and ground squirrels: good. Sometimes teen-agers traipse through and toss their garbage around in this undeveloped terrain: bad. It's easy for me to go back there and do a clean up though: good. Some kids (some really strong kids) brought some big, splintery, nail-ridden wooden pallets over to our area and tried to make a fort out of them: bad. Pallets make terrible forts, especially if you don't nail them together. If you just lean them in a half-box formation, they're bound to fall over on you: more bad. I dragged them over to some god-forsaken corner of our 3-block lot behind the house: good. But in doing so, I noticed a household directly behind us, who also don't have a back fence, and their side yard is literally covered in garbage; a big mountain of garbage, all leaning up against their house with a big sign on it that says: rats and other vermin welcome here (practically): very bad. The trees hide this house from view: good. Just don't ever walk through the trees.

While I was walking through the trees, a boy of about 10 practically bumped into me, walking in the opposite direction. "What are you doing here?," I asked him. He said, "I'm looking for a box." Guiltily, since I just dumped the big pallets against a nearby tree, I said, "I haven't seen any boxes around here." Whereupon he said, "What are YOU doing here?" I said, "Oh, I'm just checking out this street back here, trying to figure out which one it is; because I just moved here and I don't know my way around much." We both looked at each other like, Hmmmmm. That was: weird. We went back to our opposite directions: relief.

Our street is off of a cul-de-sac so no one ever goes here hardly and it's really quiet and peaceful: good. The garbage trucks don't go here either because they can't turn around to go back out, so we take our garbage cans and bins to the end of our street, half a block away: bad. My son is obsessed with garbage trucks (still), so on garbage day he wakes up too early and has to run down our street multiple times to see each truck as it passes through: kind of bad because his feet get covered in grime because in all his excitement he forgets to put his shoes on. This morning I washed his feet twice before all the trucks came. All the neighborhood cats hang out with him and his garbage cans while he waits for the trucks: good. He likes cats and they like garbage. It's a good match.

Today while I was helping him bring back the cans from down the street, I saw a tremendous garden slug on my house, sliding along toward the second story: BAD BAD BAD. I have a phobia about garden mollusks. This slug was the size of a small banana, making it a banana slug, I suppose. Only it was brown, not bright green or yellow, like I've had the pleasure of meeting in the Santa Cruz mountains (home of tremendous banana slugs). I was silently wigging out about this slug: Where did it come from? Where was it going? What did it want? I ran back into the house, trying to hide my fears from my son. It's only a matter of time before he discovers my secret: that I'm irrational in this area of life. Until then, I will have to focus on breathing deeply and thinking good thoughts: good good good.

So, not so bad! I really can't complain at all. Except the slug is gone now and I can't help wondering...WHERE DID IT GO?