Wild Archival - Day 20?

I'm losing track of how long I've been here.

Spring has come out full force by now. The grass is growing an inch a day so that I'll be wading through it soon enough, the buttes have exploded in color, and the insects are out in full force.

I opened my door last night to a small army of mosquitoes. Five minutes out there will get you ten bites if you aren't properly covered, and I can't shut my door fast enough to keep one or two of the buggers out. I had just been told a story of a group of monks who had visited the ranch last year, and how they hadn't even swatted at the mosquitoes that probably were gorging themselves on liters of holy blood, and I've been feeling generous, so rather than kill the stray bugs out right I've just been swatting them away.

Until this afternoon, when a small swarm of them had me for lunch. At that point I was annoyed and itchy, and the mosquito population in my room had reached the unacceptable level of three or four, so I ended up killing one. Got blood all over my hands.

Most of my direct encounters with the wilderness have been with bugs. It's a good thing that spiders don't particularly bother me because they have quite the representation up here. You shake anything and a spider falls out of it. I had to trap a noisy, stupid bee in a box and throw it out of the studio one day, and who should fly out of the box when I open it but a spider. I was washing carrots, put them in the sink for a moment to put something away, and when I come back a spider is sitting on the carrot. I pull my curtain open in the morning and a spider falls onto my pillow. I'm much happier with spiders than I am with mosquitoes though, so we've been getting along fine. I just throw them out of the room once in a while.

There were also some sort of moth convention yesterday. Six huge grey moths were hanging along the side of the building and refused to move for anything. I poked one a few times and it didn't even react.

This guy was about the height of my pointer finger.

I took the path behind the center again, and the flooded area was no longer flooded, which I'm taking as a good sign.

Still looks a little unpleasant though. There were hoof tracks in the mud, but alas, no bears.

That shiny white stuff is water. The path wasn't -completely- dried out, so I had to detour through the brush at right.

This lovely little field was at the other end.

One of the many lovely little spots along the trail.

I've also been trying to take a picture of the ground squirrels but they're too timid.. They are everywhere now. When I walk between the cabins they scatter before me, but they move too quick and they stick to the tall grass, so it's hard to get a good view of them. When I got here their holes weren't really finished. They were all shallow and led nowhere, but now there's this huge pile of fresh dirt that is added to daily, even though I never catch the critters adding to it, and you can see evidence of their work everywhere.

 

 I don't get the point of this particular tunnel. Maybe there are other branches somewhere.

One of the more obvious tracks.

Work has hit a level of comfortably boringness. I've almost finished going through every cabinet in the building, and next will be rearrangement, which is always a very delicate matter.