A gecko fiasco

Those of you whom I have "skyped" (be not judgeful of my verbization)have been the recipients of a proud 360 degree pan of my living space. To those of you who have not seen my little apartment-- it is an adorable and cleanly living arrangement about three times the size of my dorm with its own kitchen, bathroom, 10 foot tall shuttered window, and two closets. So for the first couple of days I was content to ignore the odd sounds emanating from behind one of the cabinets. When the squeeky/frog-like noises became consistent my roommate and I decided to investigate... moving the cabinet was no small feat because I am inept at moving large furniture(as most of you know well). When my roommate had the cabinet moved a fair distance from the wall she began shrieking about something black and moving. I peered around her to find that the black and moving thing was actually a pair of stationary yellow geckos (she has bad eye sight).

Geckos are substantially less scary than baby mice... but we freaked out nonetheless. (I do not normally consider myself a squeemish person, but something about things crawling around in my space makes me overreact.) Now that we knew there were two additional life forms in the apartment, we could not rest until they were relocated to a different habitat. So for about two hours we commandeered all the tupperware, pots, and pans that we could find in an attempt to contain the geckos. Of course at that time there was no one else on our apartment floor to hear our panic and talk some sense into us. We eventually trapped one in a collander on the wall (the collander was important so that it could breathe. We didn't want a dead gecko on our hands!) but we lacked tape in order to secure it. So I continued to chase the other gecko, but he eventually disappeared under the kitchen panel. I dropped butter knives in there in an attempt to scare him out (it made sense at the time) but to no avail.

This is when I heard someone out in the hall, and ran out to get some help... and tape. Guess who it was? Two of my professors and their daughter. I think they were a little confused about what exactly was the problem, but once they entered our room they understood that we had reached a level of madness, and it was better to just go along. They helped us tape the collander to the wall and promised to call the center in the morning to find out what could be done.



It wasn't until after our professors left that we took a good look at the room and realized how ridiculous the whole thing was. The entire room was in disarray. Pots and pans were all over the place, class notes littered the floor, and our beds were piled high with a mountain of items that had been on the floor obstructing our sight of streaking geckos. All furniture had been pulled from the walls, we had sequestered all edible items in the center of the kitchen table, and had constructed a bridge of chairs in order to reach the door without stepping on the floor.

We made a memorable impression on our professors.

With one gecko still on the loose we considered sleeping in shifts, but in a stroke of maturity we abandoned that idea.

The next day we coerced an office guy from the UW's Rome Center to remove our collander gecko. And then we were told that geckos mate for life and rarely move from their established homes. So we just disrupted the natural order of our apartment and separated two geckos who could have had a full and happy life behind the cabinet. How terrible.