Wildlife viewing

I’ve more or less settled into a routine on my work days, and it’s fairly boring. It makes sense, because I’m a fairly boring person.

So far, I’m sticking with my little workout routine and I’m pretty proud of myself. I mean, I don’t exactly have legs of steel or anything, but I’ve done it.

The fitness room is pretty small and hot. It has two ACs in it, but I can’t figure out how to turn them on. My own has a little red light if it has power, and this one doesn’t, although the remote turns on and off. So my guess is maybe they only kick in the power during the afternoons when it’s *really* hot.

Should it concern me at all that every once in a while, as I’m jogging, all of a sudden the LED screen goes red and says “No Heartbeat Detected”? It’s happened to me several times. I promise, I’ve been alive every one of them, but it’s a little unsettling.

Actually, it’s a lot unsettling. But I digress. Again.

My view for the first 20 minutes is of a blank wall, and the last 10 it’s the brick wall, since I start with jogging and finish with biking.

The blank wall is when I’m most thankful for the MP3, because I have to crane my neck to see anything. If I wrench around to the right, I can see the occasional helicopter on the hospital landing pad.

Down below, I see motorcycles here and there, or someone dumping trash. When it rains – which is often, despite the fact we’re heading into the dry season – I watch the palm leaves bob up and down.

Really exciting, I know.

But once in a while, the brick wall gives me a show. The first day I was doing the joggy thing, I caught a shadowy glimpse and assumed it was a mouse. But later, I realized I’d spotted a lizard and have seen several more since then.

Yesterday, though, was a treat. Beyond the lizards, which are my regulars, something furry caught my eye.

Crawling up on the water drain, I saw this muskrat/ferret-looking thing. Furry and long, with a triangular face and a hairy tail.

At first, I thought it was a ferret, since I’d sold them way back when at the House of Pets. But I don’t think ferrets are indigenous here. I still don’t know what it was, because I was trying to convince myself it was a rat.

But rats have naked tails, I kept telling myself. And, as if on cue, a rat came out and circled the trash can down below.

It was considerably larger than the other rat I’d seen – the previous day, on my walk to work – and definitely not the same as the varmint that crawled up on the drainage thing.

So that’s my wildlife viewing this week. I live in a city; it’s not overrun with Komodo dragons (although cartoons of such, Modo and Modi, were released as being the mascots of the SEA Games, to be held here in November).

In other news, there’s not a lot of other news. My Embassy visit got postponed until Wednesday because I had to get a new temporary visa first. My new passport *probably* would have arrived in time, but you don’t take chances like that in other countries. Especially countries whose rat population rivals Boston’s.

I'm really upset hearing about the explosion in the Marakech cafe. I do have to say that it relieves me that I'm not responsible for the care and feeding of teenagers there, though. It makes me glad I didn't get that job permanently, but I really appreciated the opportunity to go back and spend a month.