Thing Number 7 That Used to Be Normal and Now is Not

Hanging clothes on the line to dry.

Not because it was ecologically conscious thing to do or a money saver, but because I did not own a dryer. In fact, for a few years doing my wash consisted of hooking up a portable washer to an outside sink via a garden hose, and the placement of a rock just so to keep the whole thing from tipping during the spin cycle. I think there was a wrench involved too, but can’t remember exactly how.

Thankfully, since most people in the DR don’t own a dryer there are no social qualms about hanging even the most intimate of apparel on the line and, in general, the sun shines in the Caribbean thus most days are great laundry days (until Thing Number 5 that Used to be Normal and Now is Not occurs). Unfortunately, there is also the risk of your clothes getting stolen if there is no one home to watch them, as well as the risk of your laundry day coinciding with trash burning day. There is a reason they don’t market smoky-scented laundry detergent or dryer sheets.

Overall, however, there were only two major annoyances:

1. After a while your clothes get so stretched out they don’t fit (remedy: learn to buy clothes that include lycra)
2. Rainy season (remedy, learn to creatively drape clothes all over your apartment…or find that rare friend who does a have a dryer)

My current neighbor has given me the okay to use her clothesline whenever I want.

Yet, I rarely do.

Even though I believe in saving energy and even though for five years of my life this is what I did. Just goes to show you how easily we get sucked into convenience.

Wonder Woman has a cooler costume, but I guess I'll settle for Batwoman.

I am happy to report that I am now 100% vaccinated for rabies. And, four weeks after my last shot, my left arm finally does not hurt any more.

What state of affairs must occur to require a need for the rabies vaccine, you ask. Let me tell you a story (you might want to use the restroom and freshen up your coffee before proceeding, it’s a long one):

About a month and a half ago I was in my bedroom, minding my own business, sleeping peacefully when I awoke to a rapid ‘phshphshpshphsh’ sound and something fluttering around my room. Honest to goodness, my first thought was “there is a huge bug flying around in my room…perhaps a flying cockroach?” I turned on the bedside lamp and discovered nope, not a huge bug, but a good-sized bat.

My sister is forever on my case about my inability to listen to my Right Brain over my Left Brain. She would have been proud of me in that moment, because my Right Brain definitely dominated the situation. I turned on more lights and started swinging at the disoriented bat (which was now dive-bombing me) with my pillow despite a small voice in the back of my head saying, “this is not helpful.” My ever trusty Left Brain finally fully awoke and the “this is not helpful” became louder and I ducked out of the bedroom and shut the French doors.

I stood there watching it flying around and debated leaving it alone and dealing with it in the morning. But after a few minutes of standing there remembered that it was one of those super hot nights and I would be damned if that bat kicked me out of the coolest room in the house.

Resolved to go after the bat I realized I needed two things: a tennis racket and some clothes. Like I said, it was one of those super hot nights so I wasn’t sleeping in much (anything) and I was not about to go after this bat naked. Left Brain was definitely fully awake at this point, and bat hunting while naked simply did not seem like a good idea.

Exiled from my room (and clothes) I wasn’t sure how I was going to solve the whole “not wanting to kill a bat naked” thing and then I remembered: I keep my dresses in the closet in the spare room. So armed with a tennis racket and looking good (despite a serious case of bedhead) in a cute summer dress, I was ready for action.

I waited for the bat to land on the windowsill and went in for the kill.

It wasn’t pretty (did you know that bats can flatten out to avoid getting squashed-to-death, all the while hissing and squealing and flashing their claws?). I deftly flipped the pinned bat into a bag, put the bag down and beat the thing with the tennis racket. I am not the fiercest of animal rights advocates, but I had just read Time magazine's article about animals ability to think and feel emotion and this made me feel quite guilty as I was pounding away.

Now that I was wide awake, I did what most people do at this point: stole some of my neighbors’ wireless internet and Googled “are bats in your bedroom a bad thing.”

This was a mistake. Because I found pictures like this:

And read statements like this:

In many of the human rabies cases caused by a bat-stain of the virus, there was no known history of a bite from a bat. For that reason, bats represent a special concern. Bats have very small teeth, and a bite from a bat may not be felt. Any direct contact with a bat represents a potential exposure to rabies. Other situations that might qualify as exposures include finding a bat in the same room as a person who may not be aware that contact has occurred, such as finding a bat in the room with a sleeping person, a child, or someone who is mentally disabled or intoxicated. If you think you may have been exposed to rabies from a bat, please DO NOT LET THE BAT GO.


I also realized at this point that in my pillow fight with the bat, I ended up with a scratch on my wrist and thus was certain that any moment I was going to start foaming at the mouth.

Needless to say, I did not sleep particularly well.

In hindsight, this was perhaps okay because when at 4:30 in the morning I once again heard a rapid ‘phshphshpshphsh’ sound and saw something fluttering in my room, my Left Brain was ready for action and I quickly exited the room.

That’s right people: two bats in one night.

I was pretty sure it was Mama Bat looking for her kid, or the recently deceased bat’s Best Bat Friend wondering where he went. Not wanting to suffer from the wrath of mama-bat or friend-bat, I was content to wait it out on the couch and deal with it in the daylight.

After a couple hours of vivid dreams of being eaten alive by bats, I got up and cautiously went into the bedroom. No bat in sight. My plan was to call my friend Phil who, no joke, loves to capture and release bats and have him take care of bat number two. This plan was thwarted, however, as I was gathering my things for the day and moved a plastic bag that was on the floor only to discover the bat sleeping soundly.

I kid you not: it was all curled up on the carpet, snoring and acting like we shared a room (okay, there wasn’t snoring….but the little sucker did look pretty content).

Not able to bring myself to kill two mammals in one day, and armed with new knowledge from my Google search the night before, I was determined to capture and release this one. So I traded the tennis racket for a Tupperware and piece of cardboard. As soon as I put the Tupperware over the bat, Semi-Cute-Content-Sleeping-Bat turned into Scary-Pissed-Off-I-Will-Kill-You-Bat and I started to breathe deeply and recite things like, “I’m bigger than you,” “you’re more afraid of me than I am of you,” and “vampires only exist in the movies.”

I’m not sure it helped.

But here is the abridged version (I know, finally) of what happened next:

I called my neighbor for moral support.
The doctor’s office called back (being the responsible citizen and slightly neurotic person that I am, I had called to report my scratch) and said the doctor wanted to see me.
Capture/release mode was quickly replaced with “you will die” mode.
I armed my neighbor with the tennis racket, came up with a plan to flip the trapped bat into a bag for the kill.
My trash bin now contained two bats, both in Trader Joe paper bags and, for extra insurance, a plastic Target bag.
The doctor’s visit resulted in me feeling stupid, overanxious, defensive (“I never said it was a bite!”) and at the same time responsible (I was simply following the instructions of the CDC that I found on the internet).
Later that day the doctor, who had all but assured me there was nothing to worry about, calls and says, “we need to talk about this further.” Lovely.
I end up having to dig the bats out of the trash, put them in my freezer for the night, and bring them in to get tested for rabies.
Which, resulted in the following phone call the next night:

“Kate, this is the Ottawa County Health Department. We’ve got a good news/bad news situation here. Good news: one of the bats tested negative for rabies. Bad news: the other bat’s spinal chord was so damaged that we were unable to test it for rabies. Meaning, we have to label it “inconclusive” and we need you to go ahead and get the rabies vaccination.”

What followed was at least six cumulative hours spent in health care facilities over the next two weeks (including an Urgent Care in North Carolina), an upper respiratory infection (from time spent in said Urgent Care), a reaction to the vaccine (from weakened immune system from said infection), eight shots each containing enough vaccine to fill a shot glass, one very sore arm and greater sympathy for people suffering from PTSD (my cat-like reflexes were even more reflexive if even a mosquito buzzed by my head).

All this to say, I think the moral of the story is two-fold:

One, know where to find the nearest tennis racket.
Two, it is not necessary to bludgeon a bat to death. But if you do by mistake, make sure you have good insurance.

Thing Number 6 That Used to be Normal and Now is Not

Expecting that the first thing you order from a menu will not be available.

One time my friends and I went to Pizza Hut and were told they did not have any pizza that day.

Need I say more?

Thing Number 5 that Used to be Normal and Now is Not

As a my brilliantly gifted friend Anne recently stated on her blog “the return to blogging is so embarrassing.” Enough said. On to number 5...

Not having lights** at some point during the day.

This past year I have been appointed to be on the City of Holland’s Sustainability Committee. We talk about many things, including a lot of talk about how to develop an energy plan for the city. At one point someone (jokingly) made a comment about mandatory black outs during the day. Not picking up on their sarcasm at first, I was nodding my head in agreement and thought, “naturally, a great idea.” I even had it worked out in my head how we could have efficient black outs because we would be systematic about it (for instance, you know that every other day from 3pm to 5pm you aren’t going to have electricity). I was about to vocally contribute to the meeting with a, “seriously people, we can do this!” But by then the committee had moved on to the next thing and my mind had stopped daydreaming about how convenient mandatory black outs would be.

The most maddening things about the lights leaving in the DR is this…they have a knack of doing so just when you really need them—like when you needed to print something off for a meeting you have in 10 minutes, or just as you are about to show a video clip to illustrate in important point in a Young Life Club talk. Or when you have invited a bunch of people over for a movie, or right at a crucial point in a movie (sidenote: the lights leaving is the reason I have only seen one and a half of both The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings movies) or when you realize a movie is due and it is still in the DVD player (true story: my good friends took their DVD player to the movie rental place to return a movie to avoid late fees). The worst, however, is in the middle of the night when hum of the fan is cut suddenly and before the blades have even come to a full stop their hum is replaced with the hum of the thirsty mosquitoes whose quest to feed had been thwarted by the breeze of the fan.

You honestly get used to it. And though it doesn’t get less annoying, in an odd way it created a common bond and means for celebration—when the lights would come back there would be cheers, claps and cries of “llego la luz!” (the lights have arrived) throughout the neighborhood. And in some way you felt like you won something and a reason to celebrate.

All this to say: in terms of sustainability, I think the Dominicans are on to something. And we could work it out—if you knew you wouldn’t have lights from 3-5pm you simply could avoid watching movies during that time.

**Thing #5.5 that Used to be Normal and Now is Not—referring to electricity as “lights” as in the ever popular and oft stated phrase: se fue la luz (the lights left).