Ants in my pants

Well not in my pants, but everywhere else. Yesterday I realized we'd forgotten a cookie sheet full of food that we'd re-heated in the oven, and it was swarming with ants inside the oven!! And for some reasone they like our electric tea kettle and we have to rinse it out every time we use it, which is at least a couple times a day for our drinking water. If there's one little crumb of any kind of food there will be a line of ants to it in minutes.

I saw another horrible sight yesterday right before discovering the ant-infested oven. I was standing at the kitchen window and witnessed our puppy, Lucky's front feet get run over by our neighbor's large truck! The puppies sleep under the truck sometimes when it's raining out, and usually they move when the truck starts up, but the neighbor got in and pulled out really fast, running right over her feet. Luckily she's still just a puppy and I don't think their bones are fully developed, so they weren't broken, probably just pinched bad.

We recently heard some crazy stories about other islands in the Ha'apai group. The island of Tofua is volcanic and very hard to get to, but gorgeous from the photos I've seen. We can see it and the other volcanic island, Kao on the horizon on clear days here from our beach. In the middle of Tofua there's a crater lake, someone went scuba diving there and saw a huge shadow swim by him!! So possibly there are a pair of bull sharks in the lake somehow, or there are still some kind of ancient fish/creatures living there since it's so untouched and isolated on that island. Another story we heard is about an obvious murder case. But since the murderer's family was related to people high-up in the community, they ruled it a heart attack. Crazy.

Today's Saturday so there are a lot of boats coming into town from other islands. We're trying to keep Lucky, the puppy, in our yard so she doesn't get stolen like the other one did. I woke up before it was light out this morning to the noises of our neighbors and neighbor kids running around the yard area, and later singing and yelling in Tongan. Very nice. One thing we've learned we can use here is sarcasm, the local Tongans don't get it when you use sarcasm.