actually, you can keep them.

Alive and well in south Texas

unless you were in half a mile or so of a river. I usually managed to get bitten by something or other by this time, one or two itchy bites telling me they're not all completely discouraged.

This year has been extremely hot and very dry, so no bites thus far. There was a storm here on Saturday night with heavy hail and flooding and there have been widely scattered storms since then. That might or might not be enough to hatch a few hungry bugs but probably won't be.

I honestly don't miss bugs, it's one reason I live out here. I do miss a regular monsoon season instead of the 20+ years of drought we've had here.

Locally, things may appear totally normal in one area and completely out of line in another and its easy for deniers to point to the normal areas in their false equivalencies and claim nothing is really happening...but as the records for aggregate temperature continue to fall month by month and year by year in a now unbroken chain, we will start to see more and more "aberrant" events and fewer and fewer "normal" ones. All the way up to the point of no return (if we haven't already crossed that threshold now.

I think only the people ignoring the signals are being paranoid...afraid to face the fact that real, systemic and sustained changes are going to happen to the globe, and not all humans alive today will die before the worst of those effects become a crushing reality. I used to believe I was old enough to be in the group that will die before the really nasty stuff hits, but I am losing faith in that with every passing month.

bad for me in Maryland, where they appear to have flown!