2005-10-18 - 4:18 p.m.

I realized I haven’t given the stories that I promised about our honeymoon and I apologize for that because I know you are all waiting on baited breath… refreshing your browser just hoping that I have updated. Ok, so maybe not, but in my head… you are. I wanted to do it as a whole big this is what happened, but I suck and keep forgetting to bring the disk with the pictures. So until I can pull my head out of my ass… I give you Stevie.

P found Stevie the first day clinging to our bedroom window. Because P is such a boy he thought it was great. Me? Not so much. When faced with the prospect of a reptile scuttling around my house I immediately became the hysterical screaming chick telling P to get it the !@#$% out of the house. He tried reasoning with him first. “You know, we don’t even own a car… so I guess what I am trying to say is we don’t really need any car insurance…” to actually trying to manhandle him out the door. However, when he touched his tail to scoot him out the patio door, he screamed. Not P… the gecko. It was like a high pitched squeal. Did you know that geckos scream when being frog marched? Yeah, me either. Anyway, the screaming freaked P out and he decided to leave him alone. From that moment on I had one eye on him I watched his every move. He seemed shifty. For the rest of that day he just sat up in the corner (as shown), the next morning he was gone. But I had decided if we had to live in harmony I had better give him a name and back-story*. Oh and he had to follow the house rules. Rule number one (and the most important) was no friends in the house while we were out. At night there would be two or three on the lanai and a few more down by the front door and while I trusted Stevie… I didn’t trust the others. They were shifty, with their big bulgy eyes and whatnot. Besides they were much older than Stevie and I didn’t want him to get in with a bad crowd. He was only about two inches long… I really wanted Stevie to enjoy his childhood and not grow up too fast with the allure of illicit gecko fun. Ok, I don’t know what that means. Moving on. After about four days of no Stevie I just assumed he had taken his leave and let himself out. But P found him sound asleep on his dresser one day but scared the bejesus out of him and he fell into his underwear drawer where I am sure he died. That creeped me out, as far as I was concerned as long as he kept to the walls and ceiling (except over my head while I was sleeping) we were cool. He crossed the line, the image of him pawing through my things proved to be too much... I felt so… so VIOLATED. At this point the geckos were really starting to crawl all over the house at night. I am not sure if Stevie got out and told them we had the good potato chips or what but we had to start running into the house and slamming the door before they could rush in. However, P didn’t move quickly enough one night and a big one got in. This one didn’t even have the decency to do it slyly (I think he had stayed there before) he just ran right up the stairs toward the living room and into the half bath. I told P to get him out, I even fashioned the “Gecko Getter” (patent pending) out of a paper plate and plastic cup but he would not surrender. I just closed the bathroom door and never used that bathroom again. Seemed to work I never saw him again. But later that day we got his replacement… I called him “the littlest gecko”. I didn’t mind him because he was so tiny… he was almost a keychain. He couldn’t have been anymore than an inch from nose to end of tail. He was very cute and he lived peacefully on the vertical blind until we left. Stay tuned for the story of the chickens. *Stevie is the younger, less successful brother of Gordon Gecko. We believe that he was just trying to get in our suitcase to get a free trip to New York to visit his brother. Stevie is a bit of a slacker and con man.

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