Sexy Beasts

I'll explain my blog absence later, suffice it to say, I had the worst week I've experienced in eleven years.  As far as sleazy moves go, what this person did to my son and me was truly and simply evil.  I hope he enjoys the investigation by the licensing board.  On a lighter note...


My snails are sexy!  My pet snails are mating!  I opened their container to find Cheers and Purple Haze stuck together, Cheers taking the male, and Haze the female role.  Snails are hermaphrodites, possessing both sex organs.  They can self-pollinate, or mate with others, and can save sperm in their female orifice for a rainy day (better for egg-laying).  I've had them for about two months, and this is the first time I've encountered them doing the slimy.  As I don't need to raise hundreds of little snail-lings, I'll release the eggs into the wild when they're laid.  They've been stuck together since this morning, you screw like a snail is apparently quite the compliment!


Their behavior is actually quite sweet.  They keep their bodies motionless, but cuddle and caress each other with their eye stalks and mouth feelers, intertwining their stalks as if they're holding hands.  Considering their romantic behavior, they'd probably love to surprise their significant other with a bouquet of roses.  First they'd admire them, then they'd happily munch them down.  Who needs chocolates when you can have smoking snail love and flower petals as foreplay and the main course?

Is there a nice warm bit of lettuce under the chafing dish?  Maybe a succulent red rose bud?  Thank you, Tiki Lord!

The snails' names are as follows:  Cheers (for his love of beer), Molasses (he's lazy, even by snail standards), Vlad (because he likes to hang upside down like a vampire bat), Parker (for Peter Parker of Spiderman), Chanel666 (the 5th snail acquired, but too aggressive to be named Chanel #5; he's way bitchy), Val (for Valentine; he's affectionate), Purple Haze (vegged-out stoner), and Wubbie (the littlest snail, named after the security blanket in Mr. Mom).  I also have a few new snails awaiting names.


The snails are spoiled, possessing Lego cars and boats, dollhouses to live in, a bar, a strip club, and a little snail village.  I'll post shot of the strip snails later.  Here's a few shots of the snails playing in their big dollhouse, the Château Escargot.  They also have two smaller houses/dance studio/cafe/salon in the snail village.  Yes, they are spoiled, but used toys are cheap in the Paca, so why not let them live a little?  The dollhouse folds out to a two-story palace, with working door bell and lights, and its denizens love lounging about in their chairs, perching on their chafing dish, and eventually hanging upside down like little vampire bats in the attic.  Yes, a snail shrink is definitely in the cards, maybe it will write out advice for me in its slime trail.

The boys/girls relaxing on their furniture.  They seem to enjoy it when the doorbell rings and their lights turn on, although since they're deaf, I'm not quite sure how they're aware of the bell.  I think they're also attracted to the warmth of their lights, but maybe they're just into reclining beneath faux crystal chandeliers.  It's lifestyles of the comparatively (to other snails) rich and gooey!

Mammals Rule, Arthropods Drool

Screw the mites, we have antihistamines!  The boy and I are being treated for the wretched mite bites and waiting to hear back on our blood work.  Because we humans have thumbs, unlike the not-so-mighty mites, we can develop products and medicines that will (a) combat the side-effects of their bites and (b) and this is the fun part, KILL the little bastards!  Thumb this, you gnawing, drooling, infectious little aliens!

We were also advised to stay away from fat in our diets for now, as the fat apparently releases histamines, creating an even worse reaction. Sushi it is then!  It's only our favorite food anyway.  Mommy sushi (a local mother's group that usually meets once per week for fish and friendship) couldn't have come at a better time.  

Ignominious Mites

Thank you, my tiny bastard friends!  Spent the entire day frantically searching for a doctor who wanted to, you know, just for the hell of it, actually treat a patient.  After visits to five, yes FIVE, different doctors during office hours, three could not be bothered to treat us, and the other two did not answer their phones or even show up during their listed office hours.  A friend finally picked us up and dragged us to her pediatrician, who decided the bites weren't fire ants, but mites from the garden that had wafted into the apartment.  My disgustingly lazy landlady who is supposed to provide fresh linens twice per week, but only grudgingly manages it once every two weeks or so, as usual refused to provide the overdue fresh bedding (despite me mentioning that it was Doctor's orders) until I told her I would move out this very second without them.  My poor boy has now been attacked and he has bites and swelling as well.  We've started packing anyway in quest of cleaner habitation.  He's not itchy or in pain like my feet are, but this is still awful.  We have to go for blood work tomorrow to see if anything has invaded our blood streams through the puncture sites.  Mites are evil and repulsive, damn them all.  

Where There's Smoke There's...

Nature has also decided to remind us we are in a geologically active region, and one of the local volcanos, Acatenango, is wreathed in clouds and emitting a huge smoke plume.  We've experienced several earthquakes living here, not to mention frequent power outages, and with this much of a plume, another quake may be imminent.  The entire town was destroyed by an eruption in 1717, causing the capital to be moved from Antigua to Guatemala City, but none of the recent quakes have been dangerous.  Knock on lava we'll be OK, especially as my feet are too messed up from fire ant bites to run very fast.

I've Been Putting Out the Fire...with Benadryl

The dreaded fire ants have struck again!  I'm sensitive to the venom in bees and wasps, and ants are basically non-striped, mostly wingless evil distant cousins of wasps.  Some crept into my house last night, and bit one foot, and a few hours later attacked the other.  I never saw them bite, only saw a trail of them coming under the door.  The boy remains unscathed, apparently I have the juicier, most bugtastic blood.  We commenced operation squish and stomp, with me reassuring the boy that we were acting in necessary self-defense, not wantonly murdering the ants (he's very into protecting animals).  A few hours later, I had to frantically rip off my toe ring before my toe blew up, and my toes were all puffed up like over-cooked little hot dogs, on the verge of exploding.  I slathered on Benadryl and popped a Benadryl pill, but nothing worked, and I spent the rest of the night repeatedly throwing up, poisoned by the venom, I think.  Although we're currently living in a city in Guatemala, we're in the middle of the jungle, and nature likes to remind us of this fact.  My feet are still super swollen, blistered as if they'd been burned, and unbearably itchy, I almost can't even walk on them.

Rain, Rain Go Away

Rainy season has officially arrived here in Guatemala.  The boy and I are still in the Central American leg of our round-the-world tour, and we are currently swimming around Antigua, Guatemala.  We haven't seen the sun in several days, there's an almost New England quality to the gloomy gray skies.  The only upside to this weather is that it makes the snail hunting much easier.  We have adopted a couple of garden snails (OK, ten at last count) as pets, and the best time to find more is in the dark during a rainstorm.  (Snails are both nocturnal and water-loving.)  More on our creepy little pets later, we're off to the Paca now.

Château Escargot as seen from the outside.  I'll post most more photos of their strange little world later.









We're heading to the Paca to take care of a few shopping needs.  The Paca is an open-air/tucked under corrugated tin/vaguely sheltered by plastic tarps market area where you can find everything from used clothes from the States (I once scored a $700.00 Coach bag for three dollars), to fresh vegetables and not-so-fresh pigs' heads, to cell phone batteries to bootleg video games, to body-piercing jewelry, and virtually anything else that you can imagine.  We've bought stick-on crystal body jewelry there just to glue the crystals on the snails' shells so we can tell them apart.  (Yes, therapy is probably in order, if not for us then definitely for the glammed-up hermaphroditic snails.)






Some of the snails worshipping one of their two Tiki idols, bringer of all things good and veggie.

Cephalopods Who Type

A friend of mine, another ex-pat mommy, just introduced me to the world of Squidoo.  You can create short articles, called lenses, for fun and profit.  I created my first article, "Animal Night Lights", and am looking forward to playing with more.  The boy, raging capitalist that he is, is dying to get in on the action, and create a few of his own.  Check out squidoo.com and see if it works for you.  My mommy friend entirely supports herself from her freelance writing, but backpackers sick of picking up bartending gigs might want to try supplementing their income in this fashion as well.  Here's a link to one of my lenses, from this link you can also view the rest of them.  I hope you enjoy!  http://www.squidoo.com/space-theme-childs-bedroom

Sweet dreams, little astronomers and astronauts everywhere!  I made the sun from papier-mâché  and put all eighty-eight named constellations on the ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars, and now have the chronic neck pain from lurking on top of a ladder with an National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Night Sky to prove it.  But the boy does now know his constellations!  Check out my Squidoo lenses for more infants' and children's bedroom ideas.

Welcome To Backpacker Scum

Welcome to backpackerscum! The name came about when a drunken, adulterous pedophile in Ubud, Indonesia, informed me that he didn't think that I, or other "backpacker scum" were good enough to stay in the particular hotel we were both ensconced in. Several continents and a few new backpacks later, I'm still having fun, and his liver has probably crawled under a rock to hide in mortal terror. Backpacker scum follows the exploits of myself and my young son ("the boy") on our long, slow trip around the world. We'll be discussing travel, homeschooling, parenting, new cultures and cuisines, conservation, and much more. I'll be posting archives relating where we've already been and what we've seen as soon as I can.