my home -
for the mosquitoes
a famous site
~ kobayashi Issa (d. 1828)
As to the most effective means of repelling mosquitoes, the only surefire way is to stop sweating and/or to stop breathing. Fortunately, the latter also takes care of the former!
Nor am I greatly moved by jocular enquiries such as ‘Where will you put all the mosquitoes?’ — a question to be answered on its own level by pointing out that, if the worst came to the worst, a heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for men could very conveniently be combined.
Actually, the best mosquito repellent is a fan, and breathing helps.
The discharge pipe from our water source heat pump (I won’t object to it being called geothermal ; - )… it separated and broke near the end by the creek due to a poorly glued PVC fitting – water was bubbling up through the soil like an artesian well. Machine excavation would have been tricky or impossible and paying to have the several feet to the creek dug out by hand would have been… unreasonable. So I got a camp stool and with the square end of a garden cultivator (a narrow hoe) I sat for several hours digging straight down and lifting the removed soil straight up on the hoe. It took a while, but with a couple of long extension cords bringing power to a twelve inch fan blowing at my back, I kept cool and mosquito-free.
Biking along the bay today with Knox mostly running alongside it hit me just how dry this summer has been: in three hours of biking and walking a long the edge of and sometimes in the woods I encountered exactly three mosquitos!
And two stretches along that route, in a normal summer, have clouds of them so thick that when biking through them I generally covered my nose and mouth with a bandana.
Beautiful woods
but no mosquitos!
Beware of sparks.
Decades ago there was a travel agent in our town called “Aafordable Travel” for just that reason (well, almost – it had nothing to do with an ark ; - ) … He wanted to be sure he was listed first in the phonebook but especially in the Yellow Pages travel category (numeric first characters would have preceded it, but I don’t remember that there were any).