Peuan koy bpen gop

This month I found myself a new housemate.  It happened rather unexpectedly and without any kind of consultation.  One evening I found that Mr. Frog had come to stay.  I’ve had frogs come to stay before but they’ve never previously made themselves permanent residents.  Mr. Frog or Frogster, as I’ve come to call him, has been in the house for about three weeks and shows no sign of moving on.  He’s quite a welcome guest and has some entertaining habits, so I’m happy to share the house, particularly as he doesn’t take up too much room.  Last night I spent half an hour on the kitchen floor watching him catch ants and would happily have stayed for longer but I think I was cramping his style and the ant supply soon dried up.

Frogster

The strange thing is, he seems to share my routine fairly precisely.  In the morning when I get up, he stands waiting in the corner of the shower and since I gave him a little wash on the first day, I’ve subsequently found it hard to break the habit.  I’m very careful to keep the shampoo away from him and just give him a douse with water but he seems pretty happy to have a little splash around.  I’ve been trying to ignore the fact that it seems strangely intimate to be having a shower with a frog and I try not to catch his bulgy eyes in case I see embarrassment.  He has oddly expressive eyes. 

Last week there were some other frogs in the house.  They were more gregarious, bigger, bouncier and generally wanted to make a mischief of themselves, whereas Frogster moves about the house calmly, following his set routine.  They were all in the bathroom with the toilet in it and the interlopers were leaping around the place in time honoured, springy-legged fashion.  Frogster looked at me in disappointment, like he’d hoped we’d all get on but had woefully misjudged the situation.  Then he slunk off to the corner of the room, away from the yellow skinned high jinks of his oafish compatriots. 

N.B I am a normal sized person

Later that night, I got up to go to the loo and found one of the guest frogs actually swimming in the toilet bowl, which caused a bit of a kerfuffle.  I won’t go into too much detail but rest assured I did not piss on a frog. 

In the evenings, Frogster has his dinner about the same time as I do and he sits catching bugs in the kitchen while I cook.  I chat amiably about my day and try to offer him some suggestions for more fertile bug hunting grounds but he largely ignores me.  If anything, he’s a bit arrogant.

Now though, we come on to my problem.  I can’t decide if Frogster is real or if I’m having an existential crisis brought on by spending too much time alone.  I’ve looked him up on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_bull_frog and he seems to be a banded bull frog, or Kalula pulchra if you’re feeling a bit fancy pants.  All of his habits seem to fit but if I was imagining a frog companion, there’s no reason to suggest I wouldn’t get the species characteristics correct.

I’ve had this problem before.  When I first moved to Dublin, my hair turned green and I thought it was a psychosomatic effect of having a tough time adjusting.  To my great relief, it was confirmed by the local hairdresser to be an interaction between the water, pipes and the huge amounts of bleach I had in my hair and was easily remedied with a darker tint.  This leaves me hopeful that the frog thing will turn out the same.  Obviously not exactly the same, although the high levels of chlorine in the tap water here does leave my skin a bit itchy and I’m worried about the impact this will have on Frogster’s skin.  At least he definitely started out being green.  Perhaps I need to start spending more time with people.



To prove I have other interests

Talking of which, my sister is coming to stay next week, so I can get a definitive answer on his existence, or not, as the case may be.  The same sister once knew a cat that looked like a leopard and would only ever visit her in times of need, so perhaps she’s not the best judge.  Or it could be that as a family we give off strong, animal attracting pheromones when we’re lonely or distressed.  Once, when I stayed at her flat, some sparrows kept tapping on the window every five minutes and it was absolutely terrifying; like living in a Hitchcock film, so perhaps the simpatico doesn’t extend to avian species.  

I know I’ve included pictures of Frogster in the blog post but I don’t think they’re conclusive enough.  I mean, there are pictures of Nessie and faeries, so I don’t think we can rely on photographic evidence alone and I have no way of checking if what I can see in the pictures is the same as what other can see or if there is some kind of ‘Back to the Future’ style fading mechanism built into Windows.  Maybe it’s on Windows 8 and I should upgrade for a full expose of my mental health.

In other news this month, I visited and socialised with human friends, watched some fireworks and boat racing, saw a football tournament, harvested rice, designed a greenhouse, applied for some project funding, tested some soil samples, fixed my motorbike and more but I think the frog thing is probably more interesting.