It’s seems everything’s bigger in Texas, we just spent a couple of weeks in Texas off and on and have found the bugs to be humongous, even ginormous.  Every time we turned around there was something bigger than before.  I posted this furry caterpillar on Facebook and one of my friends, at quick glance, thought it was a yorkie.  Now, while they aren’t quite that big, the dire warnings we heard about touching these little beauties, we paid attention to.  The Apatelodes torrefacta can cause burning and itching to the skin, thank you to my Texas friend, John for naming the scary bug for me.

Texas bugs

I spent a lot of my formative years in Texas, when we moved back to San Antonio when I was in the fourth grade, we moved in to a brand new house in a brand new subdivision on Connie Mack Drive.  We had just come from the jungles of Okinawa, so I thought I’d seen a lot of wildlife already, but nothing really prepared me for Texas.  The first week we were there, I found a scorpion in my closet, horses in the backyard, a snake in the air conditioner…but the coup d’etat was the bull on the front porch.  School had just let out and I was on the school bus, as we pulled up in front of the house, my bus driver refused to let me off the bus.  We sat there for a few minutes staring at the bull, then she took off down the subdivision and dropped off the rest of the kids.  We returned and she dropped me at a neighbor’s house and told me to go straight in, she would wait until I was inside.  After I got inside, the phone rang, turns out my mom had been watching out the window, she was stuck on the inside of the house.  It turned out to be a bit of a wild afternoon, eventually the local caballero came and loaded up the bull and I was able to go home.  I’m pretty sure, I sat at the table and cried that afternoon that I wanted to go home.  The trouble with going home then is the same as I have now, that was it, home is where you are parked.