My Own Little Ecosystem

I onced lived in an apartement rent free. This may sound like a good deal to most, but it had its drawbacks. The reason I paid no rent was that I was in charge of cleaning the communal areas, and there was no bedroom for me so I lived in the spider/creature infested basement/garage and slept on a couch. Now dont get me wrong, this was an awesome deal and it ended up being one of the best places I lived. Upon moving in, however, my first task was to make my bedroom, or since there was no bed, my room, well actually since one of the walls was a garage door, it really felt as if I were living in some type of storage shed..... Anyways, I had to make my shed livable so that I would not wake up in the morning so injected with spider venom that I couldn't make it out my garage door. I immediately went to work with my newly purchased vacuum and sucked up all signs of insect, plant, and fungus life forms. On a side note, the Burkina school system teaches there children that mushrooms are a non-flowering plant. This is not that case, but really when will they ever need to know this fact in the future? Maybe during the next Burkina jeopardy tournament. Well, the daunting task took me most of the day, but in the end I was satisfied with my progress and that night slept worry free on my bed-couch. My bug-free zone lasted for a week or so, the I started noticing an obscene amount of roly-polys, or is it roly-polies. Where did the name roly-poly come from? As it turns out, I had upset the fragile ecosystem of the basement. The spiders and their webs were no longer there to catch the roly-polies. Thus the roly-poly men were able to find the roly-poly women of their dreams, fall madly in love, get married, reproduce like crazy, and live a long carefree life together until they became Old Mr. and Mrs. Roly-Poly rocking in their rocking chairs on the front porch of their house looking back on their lives and thinking how nice it is to own land. I am just glad it was only the roly-polies.

Then I moved to Burkina Faso and to the little village of Matiacoali, into my little bug infested hobit house. Having already had this ecosystem disturbance experience in the past, I had learned that spiders are our friends and can be allowed to live to catch flies, malaria carrying mosquitos and what not. Also, since I now had my protective mosquito net to sleep in, I had no worry of "bug attacks'' throughout the night. I embraced my new ecosystem and integrated into it. After integration, I soon realized that it wasn't only the spiders that were helping out. If I killed something such as a centipede or roach, I left it were it met it's untimely end. Then, during the night, the other inhabitants of my house that either live in my walls or in my drop ceiling descend and dispose of the body and evidence by morning. It is like a well oiled machine. I believe it is the ants that are doing the majority of my dirty work, but now they have gotten to an annoying population level and have started to bite me, leaving welts on my skin that last for weeks. I need to introduce the lizards that live in my ceiling into the ecosystem to keep the ants under control, but then I would have a lizard problem. Eventually this wourld turn into an ''I know an old lady that swallowed a fly" type of situation and there would be no end in sight. At the end of the song though, she does end up dying after eating a horse. Kind of an abrupt and traumatizing ending for a childrens song... I should teach that song to my English class. That and "There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza". I can't remember how that on goes though. Something about Liza being foolish and suggesting he fix the bucket in a way that would involve the bucket in the mending process. Silly Liza, but there is a hole in the bucket. It can't possibly live up to its bucketly duties with a hole in it.