It’s 4:00 Wednesday afternoon. It’s been overcast all day and it finally started raining. This should be rainy season in the Solomons, but this year there hasn’t been much rain.

We’ve had some light showers over the past few weeks but today it was a heavier rain. After the rain fell for 5-10 minutes, I went outside and connected the downspout to our fiberglass rainwater tank. We usually wait to connect the downspout to the tank until after the rain has washed the leaves and debris off the roof and out of the gutter. That way we get much cleaner water that we don’t need to filter.

This water tank supplies our drinking water which we carry up to the house in containers. There is town supplied water with pressure in the house, but we never drink that as it can’t be trusted to be potable. The tank has screens over the openings in order to keep the tank from becoming a mosquito breeding ground. (Finding mosquito larvae swimming in your drinking water is NOT nice!)

We are thankful to be drinking the rainwater again because it is so clean tasting. We could taste the chemicals in the treated tap water we drank in the USA.

With termites on our minds these days, when Tim found a soft spot in our living room floor, he starting investigating. Yes, the termites are in at least one floor board in our living room. Sigh. The incredible thing is that you can actually hear the little stinkers chewing away! They make a crackly sound similar to the snap, crackle and pop of Rice Krispies. Emily has her head to the floor for a listen, but actually they are loud enough to hear even if you are sitting on the floor near the spot.

The company that handles the extermination is waiting for a shipment of new chemicals to arrive including some termite baits which we will put under the floor boards. The helpful termites are supposed to carry the chemical back to the nest where it will kill the queen termite and hopefully we will wipe out another termite colony.

Sometime we will have to have a carpenter replace the floor boards and sand it down. It won’t be easy to varnish it so the repair isn’t obvious. Please pray that we will get to the bottom of the termite problem!

In the USA we were inundated with commercials with the little green gecko representing Geico insurance. I guess geckos are cute, if you don’t have to live with them all the time.

Here in the tropics, geckos live inside the house. They can often be seen scurrying around the walls and heard making a little clicking noise. At night they gather on the outside of screen windows enjoying a feeding frenzy of insects who have been attracted to the light.

When Tim and I lived in Papua New Guinea, we had lots of geckos on the outside of our screens at night. Sometimes we would flick the gecko from the inside of the screen while announcing in our theatrical voices, “Geckos in space…” as they flew off the screen into the dark night. (Missionaries in remote places can be easily entertained.)





The not so nice part of geckos are the little ‘poop’ they leave around the house. The other less than cute part is the eggs. They love to find very small dark spaces to lay their little eggs.

This afternoon I took down a metal tubular curtain rod to put up a curtain. As I lowered the rod to the floor, I heard the ominous rattle of gecko eggs rolling down the tube and the crunch of them hitting the floor and breaking. Yuck. Another joy of housekeeping in the tropics! : )

As we unpack, we are finding more things that the termites have gotten into. This morning it was paperback books. As you can see, they look a bit like Swiss cheese. I’m thankful they didn’t touch my wooden recorder which was sitting on the same shelf. I guess the books were easier to chew.

Many boxes have been unpacked now, but there is still much to be done. We are starting to see some progress and the kitchen is nearly functional, but does anyone know where we packed our glasses and mugs?