Hitchhiker

I recently took up weight lifting again. I have a job coming up where I'll be standing next to attractive thin women, and in my current condition, I would look very large in comparison, so it's the gym for me. I also began running again just over a month ago, barefoot of course ;-)

So yesterday, I packed my sports bag, including the usual things; clothes, shoes, headphones, gloves, etc; and left home. I spent a few hours in a local karaoke first doing song research, and then around 4pm headed off to the gym.

At the gym, it wasn't until I was preparing to put my gym shoes on that I realised I had inadvertently brought a guest along with me. There in my right shoe was a frog, and not a small one either! In Australia, they're called toads. Over here in Hong Kong, they're usually referred to as frogs. In Australia, they're a troublesome non-native immigrant pest. Here, they're native and harmless.

I couldn't leave him in the gym; he'd eventually end up dead somewhere; so I carefully lifted him out of the shoe and placed him in my locker. After my workout, I picked him up again, put him back in my shoe (he probably peed in there but oh well...) and took him back home, which incidentally is also his home, and set him free again.

In our previous home, we had the occasional wild visitor. We had the occasional monkey, one or two snakes who fortunately remained outside, and we had several centipedes come inside. Since the centipedes can deliver a very nasty sting, I would pick them up, usually with bbq prongs, and move them back outside again. We never had frogs though.

Our current home has quite a few froggy visitors. I don't mind the frogs, but they can attract other visitors, in particular snakes looking for a tasty meal. On one occasion, I discovered a 4' snake on our porch. When I carefully pulled various objects back to see him more clearly, I discovered that he had one frog in his mouth half swallowed while eyeing another frog just in front of him. When the snake saw me, he slivered off very quickly leaving one very relieved frog behind him. I don't mind snakes either, but ever since that encounter, I've made a point to move all frogs found within the house or on the porch back to the neighbouring scrub area. Our kids don't really know their way around snakes, and I wouldn't want to see one of them get fatally bitten.