What Is This?

I have found a tiny beetle-type thing in my water.

I have no idea how it got there. For reasons of my own, I boiled some cooler water the other night. I let it cool on the stove-top overnight and poured it into my metal cup the next day so that I could take my ranitidine. When I came back from school several hours later, I noticed something strange swimming around the bottom of my cup as I drank. It looked like this, but extraordinarily tiny -->.

I am at a loss to explain how it got there, or even what it is. I've seen them swimming around in pond water sometimes.

The problem is, there's no way it could have gotten into my cup:

1. The cup was dry from many weeks of disuse; I scrubbed it clean shortly before I used it, then dried it again.
2. The water was already drinkable, and boiled
3. The tap water is treated; I've certainly never seen small beetles in it before
4. Even if there were something in the tap water, the cup was sitting many meters away from other bodies of water, like the sink and toilet
5. My apartment was locked and the windows closed. Nothing and no one got in or out.
6. I live on the 4th floor of an apartment that is nowhere near a pond

I guess it's possible that it got in the pot of boiled water overnight and I just didn't notice till later...but how? And from where? And what do I do with the little guy now?

This is one of those days that makes you go WTF.

You can see this too, right?
I'm not imagining this thing, right?

This is it up close.

Electricity Costs A Lot of Money in Cambodia

So, I got my electric bill this weekend. And apparently it costs more to run things here in Cambodia than it does back in my Ohio, USA homeland.

Heads up to anyone coming out here thinking living expenses are cheap.

I fully confess that my time here has been marked by inexplicably high bills. I also fully confess that, due to hyperthyroidism and my consequent difficulties managing hot temperatures, I have spent the better part of my February running my air con full blast.

But NINETY DOLLARS? I mean, come on!! That's more than a lot of folks in this country even make in a month. That's like twice what I ever spent on electricity in the USA!! Phnom Penh has one of the most cheap, efficient and safe-to-drink water systems in the world, but electricity costs me such a large percentage of my monthly wages? I think my soul just broke in half.

Look, you can even see the source of my agony:

WTF?

I discussed it with my landlady, my co-teachers, and even my tuk-tuk driver. No one seems to know how one person can ring up all that. I do know, however, that the bill was initially given to the three people below me, who argued the cost. So the landlady gave it to me. And after some hard-hitting questions, I found myself extruding an extra hundred dollar bill from my bank account.

And what difference does it make? Like Gamal Abdel Nasser, I was born to a poor family, and I will live and die a poor [wo]man. The utilities companies will make sure of it. I AM PROUD.

Rant over, thanks for listening.