Mosquitoes!

I grew up in Nebraska, so coming to Houston after college was a big culture and climate shock!  It bothered me a lot the first few years that there were no seasons here.  I would joke with people that it was like living in a sensory deprivation chamber and that there were only two seasons: Daylight Savings Time and Not.

It was especially strange to me to see all the plants and trees be green year-round.  Flowers in January?  Really?...

But for the past year, Houston has been in a drought.  It's the first time I've ever seen Houston turn brown.  People's yards are dead and driving around, you can see that about half the trees along the highways are brown.  Pretty sad.

One thing I didn't notice until recently was that along with the rain, the mosquitoes had kind of gone away.  That is, until this past week.  It finally rained for almost a full day about 3 weeks ago.  And that was the trigger for the mosquitoes to come out of hiding.

We walked the kids to school on Friday morning last week and got swarmed by mosquitoes the entire way there.  They were biting us through our clothes and a couple of times, I had to start running to get away from them for a few seconds of peace.

It's crazy around here lately!  The mosquitoes are EVERYWHERE.  I kill at least two per night in our house and just in the last couple of days here at work, I've killed 4!  (and my office is on the 7th floor of an office building - they seem to be hitching a ride up the elevators and then coming through the security doors on our floor.)

The guy who sits next to me likes to tell everyone that there are two kinds of mosquitoes in Texas: the small ones that can get through the screen door and the big ones that can open the screen door.  Hardy, har, har...

(But I'm almost beginning to believe him.)