An aside about the weather

You know it is really hot when you overhear this from a gecko,
"I don't mind the heat, but this humidity is just impossible..."

Pitter Patter of Very Little Feet

I'm delighted to announce that we've had some new members of our family join us!
Last night, cogitating on the throne in the bathroom I idly mused "gosh, that bit of dust looks like a tiny weeny lizard!" dust balls being both common and dynamic in my my house.
When lo! the tiny weeny lizard did move in a non-dustball manner and prove itself to be a newly hatched Gekkonidae! Woot! I watched it for a moment, with a feeling of amazement - where could it have come from? Do they miraculously emerge from tiles if the grout is really festy? But, no, there in the corner was a weeny little egg cracked open. It was fresh! But then I was all concern - it was wading through dust and a long way from anything a baby gecko might be able to eat or drink. From a viewpoint about 3mm off the ground my bathroom would seem an immense, arid landscape, devoid of life.
So I tried to pick the little guy up. Hi-larious. My giant sausage fingers were skyscrapers and it just scampered between cracks I couldn't see. Eventually he ran up my hands and I tried to cup firmly but gently around a body like a cobweb and hustled him out to the parsley. At least there in the nascent herb patch he has some chance of getting insects and water before his egg sac juices run out. I went back to look at the egg ... and there was his little sister - even smaller, even fainter, even harder to pick up! But after a brief fumbling debacle which I fear tired her out considerably, she too was relocated to the teeming Gecko Forest that was once a simple parsley plant. I went back to the bathroom and made a slow scan just in case any other hatchlings were looking for a herbivore to bond with.
I feel that in some small way I have been able to demostrate my grief over the accident that took the life of my work-gecko some unknown time ago. I discovered his/her little body about 2 weeks ago, pinned by the bulky transformer on the powerboard that sits on my desk. The body was dessicated and I felt terrible that I didn't even know when it had happened. I took the little corpse home in a tissue and buried it in the yard.

This afternoon I'm thinking of the new babies and hope they're enjoying discovering the world in the leafy green shade of the herbs, and most importantly, that they don't draw the attention of the cat.

Geckoville

There's an utterly unnerving, unterrestial noise near my house at night.
An explosive cracking CHIT CHIT CHIT randomly smacks me in the head. It's a phenomenal sound, and scared the bejesus out of me for the first 2 months I was in the new place. I had no idea what it was and after the first time, but when I didn't die, I figured that it was largely benign. Besides, if whatever was making that kind of noise decided to attack, well, at least it would be over quickly.
Then mum was over one night. "Oh you've got Geckos!"
"Can you see one?" I asked (having just pretended that maybe it was a secret airforce jet making that noise).
"Didn't you just hear it?" she said, and didn't I look like a boob!?

So, it's geckos making that horrible sound. Since I learnt this, I've started paying a tiny bit more attention, and learnt that there's not just one very gregarious gecko co-habitating with us, but rather at least two, and more recently a little tacker. Gecko love! Yeah baby, feel my suction pads!! It's a regular frackin gecko love-in at my place.

Given that the alternative is spiders, I am very positive about the geckos. Arachnids are just too far away from my branch of the tree.