Loud Sex

“By the way,” my wife said, “I need to tell you something about the turtles …”

This is a story about roommates and their pets. And turtle sex.

Our friend Chris is moving into the Geek Farm. After he got an offer on his badly-needs-to-be-renovated house, we all discussed him moving into the guest room. It’s nice to have a friend around, help someone out with a cheap place to stay as he starts a new career and let my wife play Rock Band on his XBox360 since I’d rather not invest in a game console.

Somehow it isn’t possible for us to have friends without pets. Chris’ pets are turtles. They live in a large enclosure that now resides in my library, right next to the fish tank. After repairing the turtle habitat and moving it from the basement to the library, Chris told me about the turtles and their mating habits.

Turtles have sex. Loud sex. Not loud compared to those upstairs neighbors you might have had in college, the ones who sounded like they were casting extras for the remake of Caligula … but louder than you really want copulating reptiles amphibians* to be when living in your library.

Even as I write this blog entry, two turtles are having sex in my library. The smaller male turtle is emphatically having his way with the larger female turtle (safely on the bottom, apparently turtles have a kama sutra that would fit on a postage stamp). The male seems to really be into it, while the female is just lying there waiting for more lettuce to be deposited into the cage.

The audience can make their own joke here.

Having a roomate for the first time in … well, forever … that’s going to be a little strange. I hope it’s no stranger than copulating turtles.