18 & Life

 Hooray - our 18th anniversary is in the books!  I just found the perfect t-shirt at an Amazon returns/overstock store for .50.  :)

We'd made plans to travel to a national wildlife refuge with Pepita for hiking, a picnic lunch, and board games by the water, but we got rained out.  Severe storms here and there, all weekend long.  The best we could manage was an hour-long hike at the local bog, but we barely made it through...the rain had started by the time we finished up.  

Pepita is still not much of a hiking fan.

But she finally complied...mostly.  

Wonderful to be out, lots of flowers...

purple fringeless orchid

...and waterways.

We'd used a spray for mosquitoes and ticks, but it didn't affect another common pest, the deer fly.

They have a pretty painful bite and can draw blood!  Mosquitoes use a thin needle-like implement, but deer flies saw clumsily through skin to create pools of blood to drink from.  

Thankfully, we don't seem to have any deer flies around our house.  Just lots...and lots...of butterflies.  Hundreds.  More than I've ever seen anywhere except for the butterfly installment at the Indianapolis Zoo.

Not just butterflies.  The flower garden is drawing all sorts of bees and wasps, and one of my favorites...hummingbird moths!

Milkweed tussock caterpillars!

Lots of other creatures too.  I love, love, love having this insect draw every year and it makes all the hard work worth it!

twice-stabbed stink bugs

red milkweed beetle

oleander aphids

milkweed bug nymphs

adult milkweed bugs

I had my camera on the wrong setting the whole afternoon but I think the photos turned out all right.  I need more practice with it...I've been relying too heavily on my iPhone camera this summer!   It's just too easy to grab it when I see something "important."

cousins and armchair rabbit hunters

As long as this nice weather holds, I'm sure I'll have more chances!