Thursday, March 22, 2018

dead june bugs and mosquito hawks everywhere!



June bugs in March. That's just wrong but it seems that they have been emerging in March for several years now so I guess this is the new normal. March bugs. And maybe they aren't dead, just exhausted. They are insanely attracted to light and, being the poor flyers they are despite having two sets of wings, they quickly tire themselves out. Bumble bugs would be a better description. It's really bad for the june bug to fall to the ground in exhaustion because then they become somebody's dinner. They certainly provided Minnie a good deal of entertainment for a couple of days as she darted around the house snapping at the air. Because of course they were in the house because of the open door and all (the dirt daubers seem to have given up for now since I started batting at them with a small towel and capturing them under a plastic tub while I carried them out and in general made life miserable for them) and their weird attraction to light. The last two mornings I've scooped up the dozen or two spent june bugs laying on their backs woefully waggling their little legs in the air and tossed them out the door. The mosquito hawks I just sweep up. They tend to migrate to the window sills and corners. And they are definitely dead.


So all else I've got is the Rocky and Gunner Show and high spring. Driving the 12 miles to El Campo for yoga tonight, the evening primrose has exploded in the median of I-59. It's a gorgeous carpet of various shades of pink and I've passed several fields this past week blanketed in yellow. The bluebonnets in front of the house are at peak and a stray poppy is blooming amongst them at the edge of the street, 


the seed deposited by the flood from the garden in back in which poppies have also started blooming. 


I see how the flood, as horrible as it was at the time it was happening, has been good. This land needed a good deep soaking and the result is reflecting in the growth going on around me, large and lush. For those things that survived anyway. The farmer just across the road has plowed for cotton again after losing his entire crop last year. While some of the farmers had already harvested their fields, he had not. I know it's cotton because had he been planting corn he would have already planted. The corn around here is already several inches tall.

The work on the house took a small step back and a big step forward. The small step back involved removing two panels of the bead board on one wall and the chair rail because the chair rail looked like a roller coaster on its side if you looked down the length of it. Mostly because of the way this house was built and trying to blend new sheetrock with old and wavy bead board panels. Anyway we came up with an easy fix which improved it about 80%. Good enough. Window trim is up and the rest of the chair rail and crown molding is going up. 


I think the glass will go in tomorrow. The big step forward was Rocky fixed the leaky shut-off valve that turns off the water to the house.





8 comments:

  1. Not seeing June bugs here but mosquito hawks, yes.
    It is beautiful, seeing how well things have responded to your flood. I guess in some ways, it really was a good thing. We never know, do we?
    And hey- you're getting a rebuilt house! Which I know is a huge pain in the ass but it's going to be lovely.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I read somewhere long ago that the things we call bad are really just things we don't understand. at any rate, there are no absolutes. and I will be very happy with the new parts of the house even if my bank account won't be.

      Delete
  2. I hope you wind up as happy with your repairs as I was with my new bathroom in the old house. A lot of compromises, but in the end Jim and I made it look like an old cottage bathroom, in an old cottage house.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I love that look. I love those old cottage farmhouses. we looked at a few when we were country house hunting but they were either out of our price range or too far out and isolated.

      Delete
  3. I used to collect the nasty beetles under the security light every night, along with the frogs) to feed to the baby chicks the next day. Gross, but the babies raced about playing keep away every morning.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Those blooms are gorgeous. Glad they survived.

    ReplyDelete
  5. It looks like Spring has sprung there. And I love the way you can make something good out of something that was really tough.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm glad the house is moving forward! I remember june bugs from Florida -- but I honestly don't remember whether or not they showed up in June. The mosquito hawk we call a "cranefly" over here in the UK. (Looks like the same thing to me, anyway.) It's so great how easily poppies reseed themselves!

    ReplyDelete

I opened my big mouth, now it's your turn.