Skip to main content

Ants


I have been thinking a lot about ants recently. Not that strange when you understand how many there are in Singapore. Ants are everywhere. They are amazing creatrues; I'm sure a lot of you have heard me say this before given that I spent two weeks studying leafcutter ants on a peninsula in Southern Spain 10 years ago.

Anyway, I digress. People tend to largely ignore ants here, but they come in all sorts of fascinating shapes, colours and sizes. Nobody really says much about them, but they are everywhere. My manager even had to decontaminate my desk because there was a nest of them inside the woodwork somewhere!

I have a problem with the ants over here. They are viscious blighters. All I have to do is stand innocently preparing a meal in our kitchen and I will invariably get a munch on the ankle. It's like they think they own the place or something. They are a nightmare.

One day I was walking along on my handphone giving grief to some poor customer service representative and bang; a massive red ant jumps out of a tree and takes a chunk out of my shoulder. This, to me, is not proper ant behaviour. They should just get on with what they are best at i.e. finding the smallest scrap of food and moving in en masse to destroy or move it. Carrying items several times their own body size, and all that ant stuff. They should leave the business of biting people to the slightly more evil insects such as mosquitoes and wasps.

Ants: know your place.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Buses, bats, bites and other bits

I know I've been writing a lot about Singapore recently, but I guess that's what happens when you've lived in a new culture for a while. I've become very aware of what's around me. I get the bus to and from work every day. It costs around 15p and is fully air-conditione d. Most of the time I get a seat, it's brilliant. Today was a special day - I boarded a bus that was driven by the world's most friendly bus driver. He greeted each passenger and said good bye to everyone who got off. Sadly I was the only person to notice of the 40-50 passengers that recieved this star treatment during my journey. So I gave him a big grin and a wave as I got off the bus. I love how something like that can add an extra smile to your day. I'm currently learning Mandarin (week 2 of a 10 week course). Last week I was convinced that the whole language is a conspiracy to confuse westerners. Today, however, I am thoroughly enjoying the challenge of learning such a dramatically d
Post a Comment
Read more

Friends

I know, I know, it's been a while since I wrote, but life has got very busy recently. We currently have our friend Al French staying with us, he's moving to Hong Kong for a year and he's on a work trip here right now. It's great to see him again, and as always with good friends, it's as if we just saw him last week (in reality the last time we saw him was at our wedding last year). Anyway, as I said, we have been busy. What with Mandarin, Alpha, work and a trip to Malacca I don't seem to have had a free moment in the last three weeks. Malacca was great, it was good to leave Singapore for the weekend. The only downer was returning home to find that our debit card had been skimmed and we'd had money stolen...oh well, it looks like we'll get it back. Malacca had awesome food and it was a fun city to spend a couple of days in. This week I had an interesting experience, I was invited by my friend ZeNee to go to the final results show of Singapore Idol (the
Post a Comment
Read more

Pregnancy and stuff

How is it that my stomach, once almost a taboo subject, has become public property overnight? Often people's first reaction when they find out I'm pregnant is to stroke or pat my (already expanding) tummy! I guess I'll get used to that over the next few months. Here are the scans we have so far. Photos- Top: Scan at 6 weeks Middle: Scan at 8 weeks Bottom: Scan at 12 weeks Weather It's started to warm up and dry up here again after the monsoon. It's lovely to be able to eat breakfast on the balcony in the sun again. The hoards of ants are back, any morsel left untended is soon found and turns black with the tiny creatures. Wedding We went to a wonderful wedding at the Conrad Centennial hotel on Thursday evening. Two of our freinds from church got hitched after 13 years of on-off dating. It was a touching ceremony (during which, to our surprise, the champagne flowed freely). The meal was great - traditional Chinese wedding fayre - jellyfish, prawns, shark's fin so
1 comment
Read more