Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro: 34oC, very hot, sunny, clear sky.
It is Wednesday. Half the week has passed, and we are still making progress. I have handled credit cards and bank accounts, booked the flight ticket, and expect to finish two websites by the end of next week.
We are just passing through a heat wave in Rio at the moment. It is pretty unusual, considering it is winter, and the temperature is hitting 35°C. It is a little crazy, to say the least. We do not have air conditioning at home; we only have a poor man’s air conditioner, which is essentially an electric fan. If it is dirty, it is less efficient. Trying to sleep with this much heat is difficult and almost feels like torture.
Despite the heat, we have to deal with “Perna longas,” a little mosquito that tries to suck our blood while we are sleeping. It is also attracted to the wax in our ears. So, besides sucking our blood, we try to sleep, but sometimes it is impossible with the whizzing, buzzing sound around our ears from the mosquito.
For many people, including myself, this sound drives us crazy, as we know what it is. We are trying to kill it and trying to sleep at the same time, so it is complicated. Most of the time, we miss and hit or slap ourselves over the ear instead.
What is worse is that they do not give up, so you end up hitting yourself various times. Whether it is one, or more likely, a family or a community of them, they are always there. You may stay up the whole night just waiting to hear the sound, unable to relax because you know they are there in the dark, waiting to attack you. The next morning, after a bad night’s sleep, some self-aggression, and less blood in your body, you wake up feeling irritable, beat up, and in a bad mood.
Last weekend, I bought a rechargeable electric racket that kills mosquitoes. It looks like a regular tennis racket made of plastic with a steel mesh head. It has a button on the handle, and when you turn it on, the steel mesh becomes electrified, allowing you to swat mosquitoes like a tennis player.
An ex-girlfriend of mine had presented me with this fantastic invention years ago. She had a nice guest house and, as Rio is a tropical city where the guest house is located, she had a serious problem with mosquitoes.
They are not a serious problem the whole day, but at certain times, especially in the late afternoon, early evening, and night when you want to sleep.
Going around the flat or house hunting down mosquitoes is gratifying and fun. When a mosquito hits the electric mesh, it is electrocuted and fried simultaneously, making a cracking sound. It is so satisfying when the mission is completed. When you get a huge mosquito or a fly, the cracking sound is enormous, like a gun going off.
When the victim hits the electrified mesh, the victim becomes a ball of fire and lets off a BBQ smell, which for me is quite interesting, funny, and, at the same time, very, very satisfying.
With a racket in your hand, you become a hunter, wanting to hunt down and kill mosquitoes. Let the battle begin! It reminds me of when I was a child in England at my grandmother’s house during the summer.
Sometimes, there would be a fly in the house or the living room, and I would use a rolled-up newspaper to hunt it down. Nowadays, with modern technology, we have evolved from a rolled-up newspaper to an electrified tennis racket, but the sport is still the same.
So, my day was a day of little exercise, a little walk, and little productivity because of the heat. And a tiny insect being that is 1000th of my size that did not let me sleep the night before.
In bed by 9:00 pm.
Thank you.
Thanks for reading this blog post. Please explore my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Richard
