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.