Birds of the Air, Beasts of the Field, Bugs of the Backyard

So one thing that I did not expect was the degree of bugginess here in Texas. Of course, it varies according to the time and the season. Right now, it’s a hot, muggy summer and the little bastards are uniquely active. We have spiders everywhere in the yard (I’ve destroyed two Brown Recluse nests already) and insects of all descriptions -- paper wasps, mud dauber wasps, mosquitos (my feet and legs are apparently considered an all-night buffet), and flies. Particularly flies.

The mosquito bites are painful, but it is the flies that are the biggest problem. We have a lovely backyard here, and we’d like to eat outside. But, the flies have been so plentiful and so aggressive that they’ve been driving us inside. The first time we tried to have dinner in the yard, we found the flies massing like a phalanx on the other side of the table from us. At any moment we expected to get mugged. I had visions of them grabbing the plates and flying off with them. Sort of UFO meets Yogi Bear’s picnic basket.

I tried to at least reduce their numbers by purchasing two traps. These are basically just plastic bags full of water plus some really foul smelling scent attractant. The flies get in but they can’t get out again. They drop eventually from heat and exhaustion and drown in the water.

We had one in Albuquerque and it worked well. It kept our backyard pretty clear of the nasty little brutes. So, I figured if I could got two for our yard here in Texas, we’d be fine. I mean, how could it miss?

Answer: by a country mile. Apparently Texas isn’t like New Mexico. Its supply of black flies is, it seems, infinite. Its reservoirs of pests cannot be plumbed by modern man. Or woman, for that matter. One of the traps I’ve got in the backyard now contains a layer of dead flies, floating in the water in the bag, that is fully an inch thick.  And they just keep coming.

I guess the only thing to do is to wait out the fly season. Maybe by September, we’ll be able to dine, again, al fresco, as opposed to Al Insect. But that leaves me the question of what to do with a bag full of drowned flies.

Here’s a thought. Austin has bridge which is famous for its bat colony. Maybe I could drop the flies off there as a sort of gift. You know…

Kinda like an insectivore-ish version of Grubhub. Except without tipping. And no App required.

IKEA Revisited

So Martha and I played newlyweds and visited IKEA yesterday. I say play newlyweds because that’s what the store feels like to me, a place where people just starting out go to find furniture which is nice enough, but not too expensive, and which will fit comfortably into a limited area.

We did get a couple of items, but we didn’t visit the store’s famous cafe. That’s because of the meatballs. I really, really, really don’t like Swedish meatballs. In fact, truth be told, I figure that’s why Sweden has known peace for 200 years. All you’d need is a cranky boy scout with a slingshot and a pile of meatballs, and nobody would dare invade.

Grand-Parentization

So far we have been surprisingly comfortable in Georgetown and in the new house. Though, the move, and the house, have required us to confront some things, and that has not always been particularly pleasant. For example, we are finally forced to do the serious downsizing that is at the heart of...for lack of a better term...grandparent-ization.

You see, this house is quite a bit smaller than the ones we’ve had before. Don’t get me wrong. It is very nice, but it is cozy. Where, for instance, we had four bedrooms, a living room, a den, and a sunroom in Albuquerque, now we have three bedrooms and a living room, but no den and no sunroom. Zillow puts our square footage in the new house at 1570, where-as the ABQ house had 2379 square feet.

This has made us rethink what we own and what we really want to keep. We have already divested ourselves of a good many pieces of furniture. Now we have to figure out what to do with our paintings, pictures, prints, and, particularly, our books.

That’s been tough, and it will get tougher, but the really difficult thing is in reconsidering who we are and what we need. Today we were unpacking the rest of our kitchenware -- plates, dishes, coffee cups, etc. And that brought us face to face with the fact that, well, we are no longer in need of the twenty or so wine glasses that we’ve had for years. Four will do quite nicely, even if we have company. The same is true for coffee cups. I have a small collection of them dating from back when I was a journalist and was always getting mugs from trade shows. But, again, why do I need them? Four cups is more than enough, particularly since I merrily wash the dishes in our brand new (and incredibly quiet) GE dishwasher every night.

Of course, it is easy enough for me to take those extra coffee cups and glasses and what have you, rewrap them  in the same paper the movers used to ship them here, put them back in a box, and take them into the garage...where they will remain until (if) we have an occasion to actually use them again. But the point is that things have charged. We are no longer at a place in our lives when we are likely to have large gatherings for reasons ranging from the personal to the professional. We will have “grand-parently” gatherings of smaller groups, or, if they are large, then they will probably be someplace other than here.

This is not a sad thing. But it is a marker. We have left one stage of our lives and gone to another. And transition, no matter how benign, is unsettling…

Not a Dish Washer, but you get the point.

So much has happened...

Like it says. A lot has happened.

I will try to record some of it, but not right now.