We woke hot and slightly disgruntled this morning. One of those nights. A fly had got into the house, and as always happens when there's one about, it followed us upstairs to bed last night. Big deal you say? For Jillie it is. When she and her brother see a fly at the sliding doors in the breakfast room they become beyond agitated, both trying to catch the fly, neither succeeding. For some reason that escapes us our two pups simply hate flies.

 

So when they hear a fly buzzing around in the bedroom and dive-bombing back and forth wondering why it had ever entered the house to begin with finding itself in a strange new world it really doesn't much care for, they're disturbed. Jackie will watch the thing as it flies back and forth, then resign himself and fall to sleep. His sister is so alarmed at the presence of a fly she leaps off the bed to escape its presence and leaves the bedroom.

 

From time to time she'll return back to bed and snuggle comfortably, but as soon as the fly manifests its presence again, off she goes. Usually when we decide to shut off our bedside lamps and put aside the books we're reading, she finds it more comforting. It's dark and if the fly is there she can't see it, and if she can't see it, it can't see her...? Didn't matter last night, dark or light, the fly was there and she wasn't going to put up with it.

 

Her back-and-forth was more than a little distracting. Her distress despite our assurances, disconcerts us. Eventually we fell asleep and the next thing I knew she was beside me, sleeping soundly and morning had dawned. A hot, really hot morning. It's the heat that seems to drive flies inside. They're so fast before you know it -- or don't know it -- a fly has entered the house.

 

The prospect of heading out for the ravine in the afternoon heat and humidity on a 30C day, just didn't appeal. So we thought breakfast could wait and went off with the puppies for a morning hike through the woods. The forest confines were well shielded from the sun, and the underlying heat warning of a hot, humid day was evident, but not yet fully set in, so we enjoyed a leisurely hike in relatively cool and breezy conditions.

 

 

We were not the only people in the community adjoining the ravine to take advantage of cooler morning hours to get a hike through the forest trails in before the onset of stifling afternoon heat. And with them invariably was their doggy companions, all of whom make a beeline directly for Irving the Cookie Man who generally takes great care before we leave the house to ensure he has enough cookies in his bag to meet the inevitable polite invitations from other pups of their willingness to take the burden of cookies off Irving's hands. 

Yesterday afternoon we had noted that the ground under the wasp nest we'd spotted a few weeks back was littered with thick sticks and deduced that teens had seen the wasp nest and the litter was evidence of their having lobbed the sticks in a failed effort to dislodge the nest. Today, the sticks were still there and we noticed, for the first time, a regular stream of wasps entering and exiting the nest, so obviously it wasn't abandoned at all as we had conjectured.

To our surprise, an old acquaintance passing by, pointed out to us yet another wasp nest, a short distance from the first, equal in size, in another small grove of poplar trees. Seemed strange that two such nests would be in close proximity to each other. But before we left the ravine, in an entirely different area, closer to the creek, another friend we came across led us to see a third wasp nest, this one even larger than the first two, of considerable size.