Catching up.

Spiders and wasps and bees and crickets on steroids...... all things crawling, flying, stinging.... we're surrounded.   You would think that with the bumper-crop of frogs here, there wouldn't be an insect anywhere in sight. But even the frogs couldn't keep up this summer.

There have been scorpions in the house, but the ones I've seen were just laying flat-out dead. It's the scorpions that I don't see that will be the ones that worry me the most.  Our across-the-road neighbor woke up one morning a couple of weeks ago and found a scorpion in her bed. Nestled under the covers just as nice as you please..... and she discovered the visitor seconds after it stung her.  Needless to say, she "smashed down" that particular scorpion, but her story of that middle-of-the-morning adventure has all of us looking under the covers every single night.

We've had hotter-than-hot temperatures this past week..... I don't even think the temperatures are any higher than they usually are, but the humidity has been off the charts, which makes every day just very uncomfortable.  I was never one to complain about the heat... but these past few summers have just been the pits.  Add to that the lack of rain, and the once-again empty ponds, and it feels like we're living in a desert. I'm not even going to wish for cold (or even cooler) weather, because the memory of the deep-freeze we had two years ago (which burst the water pipes) is still fresh in my Texas mind.

The shops in town here are all decorated for Halloween..... which got me to take out my own boxes of Halloween decorations.  I spent the last two days decorating the inside of the house.  The living room, dining room, kitchen and breakfast room, plus the foyer..... all decked out with pumpkins and black cats and witches, with a few ghosts tossed in for good measure.  No decorations outside on the porch, because I know that the wasps and scorpions will find them.  I don't mind the cute little spider decorations that I have, but I don't need any real ones, thank you.

Speaking of spiders, the 'golden weavers' (or banana spiders, as the locals call them, because of their yellow bodies) have exploded in population as well.  No matter where you look, there's the familiar zig-zag in the center of that spider's webs.  There's a golden weaver web in the purple sage outside the breakfast room windows. I can see it clearly from my chair, and if I look through the binoculars, I can practically see the spider's eyes.  Every blessed day, there's some insect caught in that huge web.  The golden weaver will wrap up its prey in webbing, and leave it hanging there for hours before it starts to feast on it, poor thing.

We're living in a never-ending episode of "Wild Kingdom."