Cute little jiggers, these twin calves.
It's June 25th, Emil informs me. His teacher and I had a meeting at the school this afternoon and she admits she uses him for a calendar whenever possible, as do I. He's also very handy at telling me how old any of my nieces, nephews, sisters, brother, uncles, aunts or various other people are turning on their birthdays.
His teacher, the best in the west, tells me that when Emil's not at school it's noticed, because he fills up a room. Probably because he's so busy talking to people. Mr Social Butterfly, that boy.
We're getting some heat. The nights, when not windy and cool, are mild and fragrant. Evening-scented stock blooms in the garden outside my window, and the lilac trees have cast their intoxicating aroma upon the warm breezes today. It was hard to tear myself away to come over here to work this morning.
Don't ask me about the mosquitoes. You do not want to know. Little bastards. We're still picking half a dozen ticks off the dogs every day and I'm counting the weeks till tick season supposedly ends. But the mosquitoes— they're even swarming in the middle of a hot, windy day.
Yesterday a female yellow warbler was killed when it slammed into the picture window. Its mate will be doing double time to feed babies, now. An upset and anxious duck woke me at 4 a.m. and was still sqwawking several hours later; something must have been hunting near its nest. That's no surprise, as the cats we took over to the new place after I got the puppy are already fattening up visibly. We feed them dry food of course, but they appear to take their hunting seriously. I hope it's the rodents they're cleaning up on, and not the birds.
Too bad they don't eat mosquitoes.
oh yikes, mozzies! probably only second on my list of nasties to wasps, followed by earwigs. Do sprays and lemon scented things help at all?
ReplyDeleteI think the sprays do help, but Everett insists that they don't make any difference.
ReplyDeleteWhat are earwigs, Lou? Is that like the blackflies or no-see-ems we have in northern Saskatchewan, I wonder -- they are small enough to come through window screens and they leave a venom in your skin that itches like crazy for about four days, unless you squeeze out the drop of clear liquid.
agghhh! no, thankfully we have nothing like that here. For some reason I can't get this laptop (Benny's, he's away tonight so I'm using the shiny one :)) to cut and paste, so just go to google, select images and pop in the word earwig, you'll see more of them at the same time than any same person would ever want to see. Horror of horrors. I was having a look at your wood ticks while I was at it - yeee gahds!
ReplyDeleteKate sent me this link to a wikipedia article on earwigs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earwig.
ReplyDeleteAs I said to her, at least earwigs don't bite!
Do you have mosquitoes in Ireland, Lou? Or is that a dumb question, because mosquitoes are everywhere?