Port Aransas Retreat

Beccano and Suna Act Touristy

Suna, Beccano, and I took our first “vacation” since we went to North Carolina a couple of years ago. OK. “Vacation” may be a strong word for a weekend retreat to Port Aransas with a group of people from church.

We hadn’t planned on going, but there some kind of harmonic convergence that allowed us to. It started at the game Friday night when we learned that we had a by-week. Then Sunday at church, Janet mentioned that one of the rooms handn’t been taken. Those two things combined with a need to get away and destressify ourselves and then we were on our way.

Suna and I both worked extra hours so that we could take off
early on Friday. We decided to take the interstate to Corpus and the causeway to Port A. We made it to the condo shortly before sunset.

We spent most of Saturday wandering around the area. We started with a couple of walks on the beach taking numerous pictures of the local wildlife. At one point we saw a seabird feeding frenzy. The birds on the horizon we thick enough to be confused for smoke.

Just because it’s pretty. I don’t know what kind of flower it is.

Then we took the ferry to the mainland and wandered around looking at the sites. We got eaten alive by the mosquitoes at the estuary and headed back to the condo and the beach.

Saturday evening was taken up with a pot luck dinner. I improvised a sausage dish with pan fried Kielbasa in sauce of red wine and cheap mustard. It turned out to be delicious, and almost all of it disappeared.

This guy looks serious. You can what I mean by clicking on the image.

Then we went out to the beach again to play with tiny jelly fish that fluoresced when rubbed. These tiny blobs don’t sting, so you can pick them up in your hands. The hardest part was convincing our fellow beachcombers to turn off their flash lights. It seemed counterintuitive that you needed almost complete darkness to see very faint bioluminescence.

A walk this morning, packing our dirty clothes and then we hit the road for home. We saw another instance of the seabird feeding frenzy, this time up close.

The Good Side of Hot Weather

OK, that isn’t the official forecast, but it’s accurate.

Photo source: National Weather Service

Just four days after ranting against mosquitoes, I have something good to write about. I am not usually a big fan of summer in Texas. My motto has always been that two hundred years of evolving on the shores of the North Sea did not prepare this German boy for here. Bug again, I have nice things to say about the heat.

And it has been hot. Yesterday’s official high was 103° F. That would be about 39.4° in most of the rest of the world. On the ride home, the sign at the neighborhood community center read 115.3° (46.3°).

But the low last night was in the mid-70s, and it’s been dry. So it felt even cooler. I was able to enjoy my morning coffee on the back porch listening to the birds and watching the dogs snorful around the yard. It was very nice.

“But what about the mosquitoes?” you may ask. I think the heat got ’em. I only killed three in about a half-hour of bliss, and those were teeny. Four straight days past the century mark (Sunday, too!) seems to have been more than they could take. I’ll take the heat—appreciate it, even, until the light bill hits—if it kills off the mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes

Mosquitos suck!

Photo source: Michigan Dept. of Environmental Quality

It is officially Mosquito Season in Central Texas. The pests have taken over our back yard to the point where you can’t venture outside without drenching yourself in Cutter.

Every time I water the plants, I go armed with a can of flying insect killer. I kill a few in various parts of the back yard, but I kill dozens as they swarm around the back door as if they heard a call to dinner.

Now the mosquito problem here is nothing compared to where I grew up. There:

• Most counties have a branch of government devoted to mosquito control.
• I have seen a sliding glass door become opaque with thousands of these tiny vampires trying to get into the house.
• After a hurricane or tropical storm, salt grass mosquito populations expand enough that you can occasionally read about them killing livestock.

Clute, Texas even has a Mosquito Festival—although I can’t think of any reason to celebrate this nasty bugs. Maybe it’s the if you can’t beat ’em syndrome.

Other than further their parasitic existence by slurping blood from you and yours, what do mosquitoes (Why do we insist on adding an e to a very nice Spanish plural noun? It not like we are comparing these miniature demons to potatoes.) do? They serve no useful purpose but spread numerous diseases:

• Canine heart worms
• Encephalitis of various forms
• Malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and a host of other “tropical ailments”

I thought it might be fun to list a few of the amusing ways I have killed mosquitoes this week:

• Today, I got a twofer—that is, I killed two mosquitoes that were biting my arm with one slap. I think that rates a prize of some kind.
• I got one with hair spray while getting ready for work.
• I got one in the shower with a glob of conditioner.
• Twice this week, I found a mosquito hiding in the toilet bowl. You guessed it. I peed ’em down. That takes good aim!

So: what is the most inventive way you have killed a mosquito (or other flying parasite)? Leave a comment and let me know.