The Four Plagues

The next 12 months are going to bring some big changes in my life. I'd lay a wager on it. Somehow I think that Satan is working overtime to pound me and soften me up so I'll be too tired to cope. For starters, this has been the buggiest year I've ever experienced outside or Texas or the Carolinas. First there are the mosquitos. I worked in the bush in Alaska last year, and I have more mosquito bites right now than I had my whole two months up there! We've had to put netting over our bed so we can get some peace at night, and when I go out to water in the evening I'm swarmed!

Second, there's been the plague of spiders: I can't keep up with the daddy-long-legs in the house. I appreciate the little monsters, really I do, but do I really need one in every 5 feet of ceiling/wall interface? Then there are the nasty spiders. I'm getting bites, I guess during the night, that can't be anything but spider bites, which creeps me out. This morning I followed the buzzing outside and found a big black wood bee trapped in the web of a BLACK WIDOW! Outside in broad daylight! Under my kitchen window! The BW is now a smear on the patio (after being stunned by my trusty bug zapper racket). Anybody who knows BW spiders knows they like quiet, dark places. I have NEVER seen one out like that, but then I ran into (almost literally) one out in the pool house a month or so ago when I hadn't been out there for awhile which was unnerving in itself.

The third plague is fleas. Not an unusual plague, mind you, but I've never had a problem like this here in Stockton. We have no wall-to-wall carpeting, and so it's easy to keep the buggage to a minimum. Plus, I treat all the cats with Frontline. Yet I'm still finding little "blood spots" on our bed sheets from flea dirt on the cats, and Gordon is getting flea bites on his feet. It's nuts.

Fourthly, and I'm pushing it here; it's just dang hot. You can see my local weather on the little "weather bug" at the bottom of this page. The weather people keep taunting me with predictions of falling temps...then it suddenly bounces back up to 100f. So much for getting yardwork (or anything else, for that matter) done during daylight hours.

Well, just thought I gripe a bit.