Hey all,

Grace & Peace to you.

I trust that for most of the readers in the north that spring has finally reached you and you are enjoying it as much as we have been for the last three months.  Not a lot new to report here.  The attacks of the fire ant seem to have subsided.  We never were able to fight them chemically because apparently the ones we have are native to Texas and if you kill them off then the non-native ants move in and they are even worse!  So we are managing.  Chris went fishing this last week and took one of his fish and put it near a fire ant mound to see how that would all work out.  To be honest, I haven't had the courage to go look, but he tells me that it now has lots of tunnels through it and they seem to be systematically dismantling it.  Which is keeping them busy from biting our toes apparently. 

Meanwhile, my lovely bride, who likes to collect and identify and preserve insects has apparently been busy.  If time elapses between the time she catches a bug and can pin it and display it etc, she stores them in these clear plastic boxes that have little dividers and a clear plastic lid so you can still see all the bugs.  So the other day I look and she's got these two boxes out and there's like sixty different kinds of bugs of all shapes, sizes, and colors.  And I'm like, "Where did you get all these bugs?"  And she says, "From inside our house or on our lawn."  Nice.  Apparently I haven't thought that there was much problems with bugs down here (which is the excuse my parents use for why we had to spend my childhood in the frozen tundra of Michigan - cuz there aren't so many bugs) - but maybe the reality is I never see the bugs in situ because Maya and Chris and all my other kids too apparently, all capture the bugs. 

A fellow missionary back on furlough last summer here in Dallas said that Dallas is home to the widest variety of insects on the planet.  I have no idea where she gets this data, but if it is true, then we can only go up.  Of course, one of my colleagues in Botswana recently had an issue with a cobra in her office which you can read about by clicking here, so I guess we have bigger and better science projects to come. 

May God bless your weekend or week, depending on when you read this.