Bugs in the machine

2008-02-25, Ubud, Indonesia

Previous | All | Next

In Bali there are ants smaller than a grain of salt. I have a brand new digital camera that I brought to Bali. I was looking at my photos of the jewelry that I had taken and noticed one of these microscopic ants crawling on my LCD display. When I went to wipe him away I found out he was on the inside; fortunately he found his way back out or at least to a place where I can’t see him, hopefully not on my lens, or anywhere where he will show up in the photos. Back when I was in my twenties and ran a computer-consulting firm with my boyfriend Cameron I got called out to see a client who was having some problems with one of her Unix machines (1980s Tandy by Radio Shack). I joked with her saying “you got a bug in the machine?” When I got there and opened up the computer, a mouse was staring back at me from the nest he had made on the motherboard. I hope the ants don’t crawl into the new hole in my computer. I was reading and noticed one of the ants running around on the inside of my reading glasses. They get into food like crazy everything needs to be in a zip lock because they are small enough to get in through many types of lids. It is amazing how you can still feel them crawling on your skin or taste them when you accidentally swallow one (a regular occasion) even though they are so small. I can’t forget to mention that they cling to your tongue.

They finally started carting the huge and dangerous tree away. Like ants they chop it into small pieces and carry it by hand up the street. Now I can quit worrying about it crushing someone I know or me for that matter.

It turns out there were two strong earthquakes in Indonesia Monday and Tuesday, as usual I heard about it from Kimberly back home. No word of it from here. The 6.7-magnitude quake is the ninth registering above 5.0 to strike the sparsely populated region since early Sunday. No damage or deaths have been reported from the series of quakes. For more info: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/02/25/indonesia.quake/index.html