Hiding out...

There is a baby gecko somewhere in my kitchen.  And how do I know this?  Because I saw it last night, crawling on the tile back-splash behind the sink... small and with pink skin that was nearly see-through in its infancy.

My husband would have taken a plastic container, placed it over the gecko, then used a piece of paper to slide under the open part of the container so the gecko would have been captured within the plastic and then he would have gone outside and let it loose in the flowerbed. Well, that method is just not for me. I'm not a capture-and-release sort of girl... I don't want to capture anything... and to release it just gives the critter another chance to get back into the house.   I got the Dust-Buster thing out, planning to just scoop up the gecko.

And that's what I tried to do... except when I had that little vacuum-thing in my hand, the baby gecko turned his head around and looked me square in the eyes, seemingly pleading with me to spare his little gecko life. Oh, give me a break... for a second there, I got a little soft. Then I thought of how many places in my kitchen that gecko could hide and one day I'd be holding a fragile plate of cake for our tea parties and the gecko would pop his little head out and scare me to death and the plate would go flying and shatter into a zillion pieces and I'd be cleaning up bits of cake for days. (My imagination tends to run wild at times.)

So I turned on that Dust-Buster will all intentions to scoop up that gecko... and he ran... with that disjointed and lightning-fast pace of geckos the world over. He managed to run right across the back-splash, behind the little television that's in the corner of the counter-top, and from there, I have no idea where he went. He went into hiding last night and he's nowhere to be found this morning. And he's little enough to fit just about anywhere, and right now I don't even want to take the lid off of the butter dish that I left on the counter because what if the baby gecko is in there, licking up the soft butter and instead of having pinkish skin he now looks like a tiny flat buttercup with four legs and a tail....

There are just too many species of insects out here, not to mention the wildlife that walks all over our property after the sun goes down. We either have a big skunk or a small raccoon that's been visiting the yard every night for the past couple of weeks... and I know he's been here because he leaves his 'calling card' at the edge of the driveway every night and I pick it up so we don't step in it.

Honestly, it's always, always something. The hardest thing to keep around here is one's peace of mind.