Some Recent OOG's

Anyone who has spent much time on Guam knows that an "OOG," "only on Guam" describes the events, sometimes maddening and sometimes very cool, but always interesting, that are somewhat unique to Guam. We had a few of these this past week.

Thursday, a large area of Hagatna, the capitol of Guam, was shut down because "a 4-foot-long, 350-pound World War II-era bomb, was uncovered at a construction site next to the Mobil station on Route 4." An area of about a 2500 feet radius around the bomb was evacuated and then the bomb was blown up and defused. For an article about this in the Guam Pacific Daily News see here. Our TRACS representative, who was visiting us last week, was eating breakfast at Shirley's and was part of the evacuation. Though the explosion was heard in the surrounding villages, we were far enough away that didn't hear anything at PIU. WWII explosives are still occasionally found on Guam and need to be disposed of. I will never forget when two bombs were exploded very near our house in Yigo on Marine Drive back in the mid 1990's. The explosions shook the house and dust flew into the air off of the louvers on our windows. You never know what you will find on Guam when you dig a hole.

We have been having some unseasonable rain here for January. On Guam, when you have rain you will also always have ants in the house. There seems to be nothing you can do to keep them out. Dr. Pramanik, our TRACS rep, reported to me that he had ants in his 3rd floor hotel room. We have had to make a repair call to Guam Telephone several times since we have lived in our present home for them to clean the ants out of our telephone box. But last week I found ants in an even more unusual place. We have a USB port on the dash of our car that we use to play music and it stopped working. When I pulled it out to look at it a stream of ants came out. Fortunately, the port itself was not damaged but the 8gb flash drive is now defective and unusable. I wonder if ant damage is covered in the warranty?

One more fun OOG. It is somewhat rare to see a monitor lizard in the wild on Guam, but we now have one living in the jungle next to our house and it seems to enjoy sunning itself in our backyard. Our daughter Missy and new husband, Cliff came to visit last week (more on that in posts in the near future) and Cliff was hoping to see a monitor lizard. I told him not to expect to see one in the wild. But in the week they were here, he saw a couple of them in captivity and then we saw two in the wild yesterday at the Two Lover's Point Park. The lizard on the left is a pet that we saw at Chamorro Village. On the right is a picture of one of them that we saw yesterday. Can you find him on the rock? In addition to that we saw a large turtle swimming in the ocean while we were at Two Lover's Point. I have seen them in the wild in Palau and Chuuk but never on Guam.

Though the weather is pretty much the same here every day - high in the mid-80's and low in the upper 70's with chance of rain or chance of sun - you never know what might happen or what you might see on Guam.