It has been so nice in East Tennessee this past week. Think 70’s during the day with a few light sprinkles. A week ago today it was SNOWING, for goodness sakes. The forecast for the foreseeable future, according to the local Dopplercast 9005 Weather Watch Storm Center (I made that up), is 70’s during the day and possibly even 80. Yeah! Mikki and I enjoyed Valentine this past week, as well as just being outside in general. As I walked across the yard in slow motion (just like the movies) with some springtime song playing in the background, I noticed the dogwoods in bloom (I don’t know what they are really but let’s call them dogwoods because that sounds nice), pretty purple flowers, bees buzzing about, wasps wasping…around me…get it off, get it off, GET IT OFF!

Just today, this very day (well actually since it’s after midnight, technically yesterday now) Mikki and I noticed a ton of flies bothering our expensive investment large family pet. We knew the flies would come. The flypaper hanging from every beam in the barn warned us of that. Now that the little critters are hatching, it’s time to get serious about a fly control strategy. Up for consideration: better manure control, evil fly-eating but horse-friendly parasites, fly strips (hung outside the barn since they are an attractant), on-feed fly larvae killer (such as Solitude IGR from Pfizer, containing cyromazine) and a solar fly trap (not sure what that is yet). Poor thing (the horse, that is) is being pestered something fierce and it’s only going to get worse. We’ll try a few of these “fly control” systems out and report back what’s working and what’s not working.

Oh, by the way, today is Parenthesis Day (in case you didn’t know). Okay, I made that up too but I did use parentheses 8 times in this post (in case anyone is counting). Oops, 9 times now.