Pretty much by late August...

....I'm just waiting for fall. Summer seems tired, dusty, buggy, full of spiders and other bugs, heat and humidity, air pollution, pollen, mold spores, you name it. After the first hard frost the air clears, it begins to look clean again. Yeah, I know it means winter is coming. My favorite month? October, then spring. I can't pick a month for spring because here it might be May one year, April the next, or even June. But most certainly summer is July. August is spider month. September, too, it it stays warm enough.

What is spider month you ask? Webs....at night. I'm afraid to walk outside at night unless I'm armed with a flashlight and a broom. I will not, I repeat, NOT walk into an orb web. The panic and fear attack I would experience would probably put me in the hospital. Yeah....it's that bad for me. My daughter just laughs and touches them while I stand at a distance, trembling and pale. Now a spider...without the web...I can take a tissue and grab it (and flush it). And those little black fuzzy jumping spiders? I don't mind them. They aren't web builders.

The only thing my mom could figure out is that when I was a baby the silk ribbon on my baby blanket frayed into hundreds of gossamer threads, and my mom found me tangled in them, screaming. Early imprinting? Whatever. The fear won't go away.

Happy Anniversary

To me & my hubby!

In case you were curious...

....the Albanian alphabet and how to pronounce it. I love listening to my hubby speak. Being from Kosovo he speaks the Gheg dialect, which is different than Tosk, the official Albanian dialect. Our 2nd anniversary is coming up and still I only know maybe a dozen words. Hubby speaks many languages, but he has trouble understanding some Americans when they speak. We tend to speak "sloppy", like saying "budder" instead of "butter". Also there are accents and dialects. Once someone told me their address and it sounded like "say-er". I couldn't verify it online. Finally, after she texted me her address I saw that it was "Fair". I have heard everything here, from southern drawls to Boston to something weird where people say "hay-yand" instead of "hand" and "hay-yed" instead of head. Talk about butchery.

warm, worms.....warm worms...?

Ahhh...so I have an accent...who knew. Hubby said he forgot to drink his Red Bull, so he was going to leave it in the car. I told him he should drink it, because it will get warm. He thought I said "worm". We agreed we often get lost on each other's accents. Albanian is phonetic. Each letter is pronounced ONE way, mostly. If you know how to pronounce the letters you can pretty much say the words. Of course there are some letters that make sounds that don't exist in English, so Americans tend to fall flat when trying to pronounce them. And many American ways of pronouncing things are very difficult for Albanians, and our mixed up ways of pronouncing the same letters all sorts of ways are confusing. It certainly makes for colorful conversations :)

Bugs & spiders

We have most of the problem under control now. We have a spider I have never seen before. There was one in the bathroom. Then one outside on the side of the house near the ground. Then another in the bathroom. They are all dead. Ewww. Big, like the body was 1/2 inch long and short legs. They were reddish-brown and hairy. Not the brown recluse. I saw one of those and killed it. Not a wolf spider. I creeped myself out looking and looking at spider pictures and I can't find it. I guess if I see another I will need to take a picture before I kill it. Yeah....like that's going to happen. I have arachnophobia for sure.

Anyway, the big difference between houses in Europe and the USA, unless you have a brick house, then you  probably have a wood-frame one. Wood-frame houses have a bajillion places where bugs can enter and hide between the walls. In Europe you just seal up the cracks, inside and out, easy peasy....no entry.

Ants....they come in looking for water. We have everything sealed in containers or ziplock bags and put the garbage out immediately. It has helped.

Earwigs....we only saw a couple since the massive siding-banging spraying episode.

There is still sooooo much to do to this house and yard to get it ready to sell.

Cool & dry

We have are having a run of real cool weather, while the rest of the world is warmer than normal. We are taking advantage of the cool weather to get some yard work done. It's waaaay too dry, though. We are keeping the bird bath filled, so the birds have some water. Living room is coming along slowly.

It's been too hot! The living room is mudded. Needs to be sanded and mudded again. We had to spray for bugs. We kept getting earwigs and ants in the house. This spring I bought a pretty pot of pansies. But lately the blooms have been reduced to chewed stubs. I picked up the pot and HUNDREDS of earwigs went running everywhere. They don't seem to eat Impatiens but there were hundreds hiding under those pots as well. I tossed the pansies. Why feed those suckers.

So we bought some barrier spray. Then we cleared all vegetation that was next to the house. Then we started spraying. Hubby bumped the side of the house and omg THOUSANDS of ants and ant eggs poured out from behind the siding. So we changed tactics: bang on the house, spray like crazy. Every few feet or so dozens of earwigs would pour out, like scarab beetles in an Indiana Jones movie. It was so gross!!!

It looks like the heat spell will break this weekend.