Icarus Would Be A Bad Name For A Plane

Yet more from the Mostly Annoying But Also Slightly Gross files: I discovered not one, but two nests of the local breed of sugar ant in my house last weekend.  One was hidden (are you ready for this?...) in the spine of a book on my bookshelf.  The little maniacs had gotten in Friedman's The World Is Flat sometime in the last two months and started nesting in there!  I wouldn't have noticed it, either, if I had not seen more than a few ants surreptitiously winding their ways to the book on the end and away from it.  So I Raided both nests and continued about my way.  Not to be outdone, after lounging and reading (something else) in my hammock for a while, I got up only to find a very young specimen of the same orange spider that has been haunting my steps lately lounging along with me in the hammock.  It met an abrupt and unceremonious demise.  Then, as if things could not get any more ghastly, I was enjoying the last runs of Stargate: SG-1 while they were still available on Hulu, only to feel something gently tickling my leg. (!!) A millipede had somehow found its way nearly up to my knee before being detected.  A poor choice, perhaps – its remains are currently being harvested by ants in the garden.  Okay, that's enough of that; I'm holding my breath for more soon! (or just because the pesticide smells like poison)

Thanks for your patience; here's the January highlight video.

Funnyquote Friday

Your quote this week comes from one Dominican student who, starting last week at the Dr. William Connor Primary School despite speaking nearly zero English, explained to me her difficulties in understanding those around her:

"No podría comprender al profesor, 

porque pronuncía mal."

I couldn't help but chuckle at this – the Caribbean accent was even getting in the way of a Spanish speaker understanding.  Hilarity!

I gave my apartment a good cleaning yesterday, which in light of the recent exhibition put on by insectoid residents of the premises was a good idea.  Between Tuesday and Thursday of this week I found another spider of the same species as the New Year's culprit, though this one was much earlier in its life cycle, being only about 2.5 inches and much more manageable.  I removed it from my ceiling with a fly-swatter.  Not moments after laying its deceased remains in the garbage can, I retired to my bedroom to find a large black cockroach about 1.5 inches long climbing on the curtains.  What was it doing there?  There were no survivors left to inform the council.  Finally, yesterday in my kitchen, I was approached by an inexperienced but highly persistent centipede, measuring only about 3 inches.  I was not as impressed with its number of thoracic segments so much as its unwillingness to die for its cause.  Squishing its multifaceted exterior between the rubber sole of my shoe and the tile floor dealt it no apparent bodily damage, and only served to pin it in place.  After half-a-dozen similar attempts, I even tried to sever its southeasterly half from its northwesterly half with a steak knife, but to no avail.  This guy... is a survivor!  Anyway, a solid pounding and Kleenex removal later, my apartment is presumably carnivorous critter free – if you don't count the dozen-or-so daddy long legs camped out in my bathroom, presumably getting an early start on the next Harry Potter release.

I don't think there's any other big news here.  I've never seen a post on this blog earn so many hits so fast before the last one, which is either a testament to its interestingatude, or just a natural offshoot of having an increased readership from previous months.  And yet no comments?  What up with that?

Do You See What I See?

I've been meaning to add this themed post for some time now.  Basically, it seeks to take you, the reader, who may not have any personal blogging experience, "backstage."  Obviously, if you are a current PCV with your own blog, this post will be pretty boring to you, so I won't be offended if you check out now.  For everyone else, here we go...

This is what I see when I log in to my Blogger account.  As you can tell, there's a new post up at Vivos Voco, one of the many Volunteer Blogs I am currently following.  Further, including this new post, I can see that I am currently at 69 Blog posts, and I have 17 Googlers following my blog.  Granted, the bottom of this page currently (as of this post) reads 16 followers, which means that one of them is secretly following privately (intrigue!).  I already had this idea for a post some time ago, as I mentioned, so I head over to "Edit Posts" to find and update it.

Here I can peruse the somewhat extensive list of all my previous Blog posts and any I have currently in the works, which right now totals zero, save for this very post which will soon jump to the top upon publishing it.  I can also add/remove tags to current posts without having to navigate to them, and check comments for each one as well.  It's all very convenient.  So I choose "Edit" next to the post entitled, "Do You See What I See?" and begin writing this post.

This is the dialogue entry interface, where I can input all of my thoughts, pictures, video, or artwork.  I am currently editing this very Blog post (ooh, how meta!).  Then, after I'm done editing the post and I want to check up on any pageview stats and milestones, I can just head over to the Stats page, like so:

I spend probably about equal time here, composing posts, and viewing my Blog in its traditional format.  This page alone can tell me (1) all the pageviews for my Blog since inception, by minute, hour, day, week, or month, (2) the most popular posts by pageview, (3) the most common sources of links to this blog from sites that particularly allow this information to be extended to Blogger, and (4) the regions from whence the majority of pageviews originate.  To no one's surprise, the most common countries in this blog's audience are the US, St. Kitts/Nevis, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, and St. Lucia, in that order.  This is all very fascinating to me, and every now and then I stumble across curious gems like this one:

A list of the keywords that were entered into a common search engine immediately before selecting a link to some page in this Blog.  If you don't get why my blog popped up on the last search, double check this post from the recent past.  Anyway, that sure made me chuckle when I saw that.

Well, that's about it.  I hope you enjoyed this tour of the inner-workings of my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  This month's highlight video should be ready on schedule, and it will probably be appropriately brief – just the way you like it!