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!

brown county bounty

Forget peak leaf week...I think we hit peak leaf DAY when we went to Brown County State Park this past week!

Colors were amazing.

Others were haunting the trails, too.

red-tailed hawk

"woolly bear" caterpillar

painted turtles

And why not?  It was almost 80 degrees!  At home, I continue to see insects everywhere...and it was so warm the other night that I heard tree frogs singing...kind of unusual for late October.  

spotted cucumber beetle

milkweed bug nymph

oleander aphids

But I don't think I'll be seeing them for long.  In the span of a few days, we're going from 80 to 23 degrees, and the hard frost will kill everything in the garden and send these bugs into hibernation.  It's amazing that we've had flowers for this long!  I gathered up a big armful today for the last bouquets of the season.

The kittens have been loving the sunshine...

...but they will like curling up by a warm fire, too.  We'll see what happens over the next few days.  Have a great week!