Worst Morning Ever

Let me start by apologizing for my inconsistent (at best) posting this week. I really have no good excuse, other than the fact that this steady, scorching heat is getting to me and zapping all my motivation and energy (seriously. In July, we only had seven days with highs lower than ninety--and six days with highs in the triple digits. I'm pretty sick of it). Yesterday I broke a sweat just driving my car (with the AC on full blast) and couldn't bear the thought of going to the gym and actually getting hotter and sweatier working out. So I didn't. I came home and sat in my basement instead, organizing and reorganizing pictures and boxes for like the third time this summer.

But, last night we (finally!) got some legitimate rain, and the storm system brought some cooler temperatures with it (high today in the eighties!) so I was feeling rejuvinated. I was all ready to head out to do some work in (what is left of) our garden, but decided to first take a picture of our rain gauge, proudly holding almost a full half inch of rain for the first time since we installed it about a month ago (seriously--we've been that dry. Darrell didn't have to mow once the entire month of July). So, I reached out over the deck with my camera and, well, I'll let the picture explain the rest.

For the record, this picture was clearly not taken from on the deck where I was originally standing. As I leaned out over the deck railing to check the gauge and snap the picture, my eye caught the wasps' nest and I panicked. Like, called Darrell in tears about it panicked. Call me a girly-girly or whatever, but wasps terrify me. And as you might remember, this isn't our first run-in with wasps' nests on our property (see posts from last May and last August). And oh, did I mention that this nest is HUGE??!?!

Just looking at that picture triggers my gag reflex. But since I didn't want to miss documenting this monstrosity, I grabbed Darrell's camera and most powerful zoom lens, and went out in to the backyard (don't kid yourself into thinking I walked down the stairs of our deck--I went out through the garage and walked around to the backyard, taking a very large arc around our deck). And normally we catch the nests before they get this big; since we know we have a history with wasp issues, whenever we see a wasp flying around we do a survey of the whole perimeter of our house searching for a nest. But because of the heat we really haven't been outside (and the wasps probably haven't been very active) so we haven't noticed them. Until now.

I know that the smart thing to do would be to take our wasp-killing spray and go to town on that nest while it's cool and all the wasps are hanging out there and are fairly dormant, but I just can't bring myself to do it. There's just so many of them that I'm afraid one would get pissed before I actually get it sprayed and it would come after me, causing me to misfire and miss more of the nest, causing more angry wasps to come my way (worst case scenario? Probably. But that's the way I think). Plus, because of where the nest is, the only really good angle to get at the whole nest is by standing somewhat under it, and I know from experience that when those wasps do get hit they drop straight to the ground--as do those blobs of larvae. And I'm not about to deal with that. This is why I have a husband--taking care of insects and creepy-crawlies clearly falls in to his job description.