{"id":39,"date":"2006-05-04T21:38:49","date_gmt":"2006-05-05T02:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rreynoso.com\/blog\/archives\/39"},"modified":"2007-05-10T22:25:09","modified_gmt":"2007-05-11T03:25:09","slug":"survival-of-the-fittest-ex-new-yorkers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/home\/survival-of-the-fittest-ex-new-yorkers\/","title":{"rendered":"Survival of the Fittest Ex-New Yorkers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adaptation, say evolutionists, is key to survival. A creature , out of its natural habitat has three choices: completely change an ecosystem (imagine an MCF<\/a> link to a Simpsons episode here), die or become part of the system. As a city-born, native New Yorker now relocated to the downright rural, I must adapt to my situation or be enveloped by my surroundings. Tonight, this lesson was made very clear.<\/p>\n

My wife and I had put the troubles of the day on pause and were enjoying the cool breeze coming though the screen windows of our countryside home while watching TV. The family room–usually the kids’ play room–was now our fortress of solitude. The dishes had yet to be placed in the machine; the dining room had yet to be put in order and we didn’t care. There was a perfect silence in the house; our kids were asleep.<\/p>\n

I stepped out of the family room into my office to check on some emails where I spotted a single bug, which I proceeded to kill. I had my share of bug encounters in New York and have learned that there are no natural predators for urban shoes. A heavy rat may dare us, but it flees after a good ground stomp. A roach threatens infestation, but it falls beneath a New Yorkers’ mighty weight (especially if said New Yorker lives on the upper floors of an apartment building which is periodically visited by a professional exterminator).<\/p>\n

As I scraped the shattered remains of the insect into the toilet, I made a (vain) attempt at humor about termites. My wife corrected me explaining that, whatever it was, it wasn’t a termite. She went upstairs to start on the dining room; I would soon follow.<\/p>\n

My wife’s scream pulled me out of my reverie and turned my blood to ice. I threw myself up the stairs with violent thoughts of injured children. Bursting into the dining room, scanning her body for injuries then settling on her wide eyes, I begged her to tell me what was wrong.<\/p>\n

“They’re everywhere.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adaptation, say evolutionists, is key to survival. A creature , out of its natural habitat has three choices: completely change an ecosystem (imagine an MCF link to a Simpsons episode here), die or become part of the system. As a city-born, native New Yorker now relocated to the downright rural, I must adapt to my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home","category-the-bugs","category-town"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}