Mosquitos, Spiders, and Millipedes

So, I believe that enough time has passed that I can face writing the entry I tried to post a few nights ago all over again.

At night, I prefer to sleep with the room slightly cooler than during the day, so that I can sleep under covers of some sort -- in fact, I have a hard time relaxing and sleeping if I do not have something covering me -- in fact, this is even true when I sleep on road trips. This is related to three reasons having to do with growing up.

1. Mosquitos. When my siblings and I were young, we had blue and pink mosquito nets hanging over our beds and closed with clothespins from the inside. During the day they were clipped open. I rather liked them -- they felt like princess canopies to me. When we grew older, we moved to a place with less standing water and so worried less about mosquitos biting us in the night. Not that there were NO mosquitos (some carrying Malaria, Dengue Fever, and other diseases), but that there were fewer of them. I began to like sleeping under covers -- with the ceiling fan producing that kind of uneven rhythm, because that way my feet didn't wake up with mosquito bites on the bottom on my calluses -- probably the most irritating spot to be bitten.

2. While I usually liked sleeping with covers during elementary and Middle school, my habit of was reinforced during high school. Since it was rather warm in my room junior year (I had an air conditioner that we hardly ever ran because it had a habit of tripping the breaker) because my windows opened to the hallway of the house, I usually slept with a standing fan blowing right on my from a few feet away. One night I woke to something tickling my bare calf. I thought it was the shoe-lace drawstring in my hand made (by me) pillow case at first. But then I looked and discovered a spider a little over two inches in diameter crawling on me. With a furious kick and a swipe (and possibly a low yell) it went flying into the corner and I stood up and flicked on the light. I couldn't find it and slept nervously (and with a sheet covering me) for weeks.

3. Finally, during the High School beach trip at the beginning of senior year, my inability to sleep well without covers was cemented and has yet to alleviate. I was sleeping on my mat at the edge of the tarp with the High School girls (under a mosquito net that was tucked in tightly around the edges of the two-inch foam) when I felt something crawling up my leg. I grabbed at it and caught it between the folds of my loose sweatpants. With one hand I fumbled for my flash light and turned it on so that it was pointing into the jungle, leaving it on the mat. I scrabbled at the mosquito net and walked awkwardly, still holding my pant leg, a few feet down the trail right next to my bed and into the jungle, then yanked down my pants, turning them slightly inside out and revealing that I had caught a 3 1/2 inch millipede climbing up my thigh. I flicked it out into the jungle and got in bed.

So. I'm not sure why, exactly, I haven't grown out of it in the last 8 years. But. I feel like I am mostly justified. After all, Texas has big bugs, too.