Things that go splat in the night

Because we live in a sub-tropical climate, mosquitoes are a problem here. The bugs carry all sorts of nasties, including Dengue fever and Japanese Encephalitis. We don't have screens in our windows, so we do get some mosquitoes in the apartment. And they love, love, love D. At night, they gnaw on his ankles and calves, and in the morning, he's usually covered with fresh bites on top of old bites. To make matters worse, he scratches and scratches the bites until they're so vile looking that he appears to have leprosy.

I decided that enough was enough and purchased mosquito netting for our bed. We don't have a poster bed, so I couldn't buy the kind of netting that drapes down over the posts. Instead, I had to buy this dorky tent-like structure. It has flaps that zip open, and the zippers have tabs on the inside and outside. So, we can open the the side flaps, get into bed, and then zip it closed around us. The result? A mosquito-proof cocoon.

The is one problem with this set up, however -- namely, Jameson's (the cat) inability to understand that she can't jump through the netting even though she can see through it. She's used to being able to just hop right into bed with us. Now when she tries to do that she ricochets off and splats onto the ground (You know the sound that a cat makes when it hurls its body against a window screen? That's what this sounds like).

D was relaying this story to one of his colleagues, a guy from Bangladesh. After D's colleague recovered from hearing that our cat slept in our bed (this really seemed odd to him), he expressed surprise that this was our first experience with mosquito netting. Where he's from, everyone uses it all the time because the mosquitoes will eat them alive otherwise. People don't even wear shorts, the mosquitoes are so bad. I guess Bangladesh is on our list of "visit but don't live there" places. D's flesh would not survive.