Yuck! It's fly season again!

We've lived in Gracias for 3.5 years now - just long enough for me to start figuring out which odd events are flukes, and which are seasonal. One item which is a regular part of life here is the annual invasion of the house flies. Sigh.

Every year, in late March/early April we get to experience this joy again. Oddly, considering we live in the tropics, we don't have problems with lots of bugs all though the year. A number of the houses in which we have lived have not had window screens, and this hasn't really been a problem.

Our current house actually does have screens, although there are still lots of places where flies and other critters can get in. A few days ago, we noticed a fly or two in the house.

The next day . . . we started to be annoyed by flies landing on us, and buzzing around our heads every couple of minutes. Oh, that's so bothersome!

Now, we are seeing flies everywhere! And it is still only the very start of several weeks of flies!

I know the progression now. In a few days, we will have to cover any food or drinks that we use, even while cooking and eating, or suffer through flies continually landing on everything. Walking through town, trash, dog poop piles, and dropped food will be unrecognizable, as their surface areas will be completely covered with flies.

Our first year in Gracias, the entire family went down with a terrible version of the stomach flu during fly season. This experience was made much worse by the fact that our water and electricity were out for most of the week when we were sick.You probably don't want me to enumerate the ways your life gets terrible when you can't flush or wash laundry, even when everyone isn't sick. It was unbelievably bad with eight people having the stomach flu! Plus, we are normally able to eat up the food in the fridge and freezer when the power goes out, so that we have minimal losses - but no one wanted to eat during this sickness, so we ended up giving away and feeding to the dogs a lot of formerly frozen meat!

Since that first year, we've been able to avoid getting sick during fly season, although there is much sickness around town at this time of year. We've not found a way to keep the flies out of the house, but we mop the floors with heavily concentrated bleach water, regularly, are crazy vigilant about covering food, and work on keeping our own dog messes cleaned up promptly, and our trash collection area as clean as possible.

The only good thing about fly season is that it only lasts a few weeks.

Aaaarrrrggghhhhh! Flies!