We are in the midst of a miserable mosquito season. I don't know if it is worse this year because the flood waters provided additional breeding grounds for them but we are absolutely inundated with mosquitoes! Christopher and Caitlynne wake up each morning and complain about being bitten throughout the night. Mosquitoes swarm around the outside of all of our doors and it is impossible to get in or out of the house & the car without one or two (or ten or fifteen) sneaking in as well.
The large numbers of mosquitoes are especially worrisome because there are several diseases that can be transmitted from mosquitoes and two of them, Dengue Fever and Japanese Encephalitis, are pretty common here. So, in an effort to limit our exposure to them (the p.c. phrase for "eradicate the mosquitoes"), I invested serious money into four "Black Holes"...
and two "I Don't Know What These Are Called But They Look Like Electric Tennis Rackets"...
We set one black hole outside our back door and it is already full of dead mosquitoes. One black hole will go in each of the kids' bedrooms and the last one will go in our kitchen. Hopefully, that will help get rid of the mosquitoes that manage to sneak into the house. Every so often I walk around the exterior of the house with the electric racket and get rid of a fair number that way. The mosquitoes are like little sparklers going off when they hit the wires on the face of the racket.
In other news... we are gearing up for the start of the Bangkok Baseball & Softball League. The teams were selected and began to practice this week. Opening Day is this Saturday and the season continues through early May. Each team plays two games a week (only on Friday nights, Saturdays & Sundays) so, with practice time added in, we will be spending a lot of time at the baseball fields. Christopher continues to practice with the Bangkok baseball team that will be going to Perth, Australia at the end of March. Fortunately, that team just practices twice a week and does not have any scheduled games until the tournament. Occasionally they will play a scrimmage game but that is very infrequent.
I am continuing to log great mileage for my transcontinental run. Since December 1st, I have run 174 miles from Hampton, VA. This was my view at the end of my run this morning - about 4 miles from Rivanna Puritan Lake in Fluvanna County, VA.
I am slowly but surely heading in the direction of Charlottesville, VA. My one disappointment with this program is that I can't "see" the distance to be covered to reach the towns/cities ahead of me on the route. And this matters why?!? Well, my original plan was to pick a "destination" (town, city, lake, state line) at the beginning of each week and, knowing the mileage it would take to get me there, plan my weekly runs & mileage so on Sunday, I would finish at that destination. Oh, well... it is what it is. I do enjoy the program because, having lived in Virginia for so many years, a lot of the towns and landmarks on the route are unfamiliar to me so I learn a little bit about Virginia with each run. It is also fun to run through a town and have some "connection" to it. I recently ran through Louisa County, where one of Kevin's fraternity brothers grew up and Mineral, VA, the epicenter of the East Coast earthquake last year.
Also in running news... Kevin and I signed up to run a 10K race on February 12th. This is the race I had previously blogged about and was very much on the fence about entering. It turns out a large contingent from the Embassy (including the Ambassador) will be running so we decided to join in the fun. I am going to spend some time working on my speed so I can have a fairly respectable finish. Most mornings I take the dogs with me for a good portion of my runs and my pace has decreased a lot with all of their stops to sniff and pee. My plan is to just do a 1 or 2 mile warm up run with them, drop them back at the house and continue on my own at a much faster pace. We shall see how it goes...
I shall leave you with a photo of my latest project. I have wanted something like this FOREVER! Whenever I was on Pinterest or looking through magazines and saw ANTLERS, I salivated. Last week, I was downtown and saw this figure (it was snow white then) in the store. I bought it and, after a few coats of gold spray paint, it was exactly what I wanted!
Have a great Tuesday!
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