What's bugging me?

Found it! Tough little thing. Tried the flyswatter, hard, to no avail except to make it mad. So, I took pictures and spent hours yesterday trying to find out what it is. Not a hornet it seems. It is a paper wasp: Polistes aurifer. After spending hours looking for what it was, I felt like they were everywhere by evening. Creepy. When it flies, the sound is low and slow. It's legs dangle down like it is ready to grab me and carry me away. Now my job is to find it again . . . .
The day is sunny and warm (36 F). Wild horses have not shown up yet today. The batteries are happily cooking at 30.5 volts (24 volt system).
On semi-sunny days the batteries do fine. In the summer the batteries do fine. On heavy cloudy days in the winter, the batteries need help.
We have a gas generator hooked up and have had to run it as much as 4 times a day for 30-45 minutes. Those days I was not online or even on my computer. Just the minimum load: fridge, dog fence and answering machine.
We hope to pick up a couple more solar panels to get more juice to the batteries in the winter. The sun is at about an 18 degree angle from the horizon on the solstice. That's pretty low and weak. In summer it's up about 19 hours a day and travels right over us. (We must be the center of the universe with that language.) In fact dusk to dawn is one long stretch for summer solstice. It gets dark, but you can watch the glow from the sun moving across the north.
Wish I could take a picture of the stars at night. WOW! It is beautiful here. Such a low population density making little light, the starts are very bright and so numerous. the Milky Way almost glows from one horizon to the other.

Speaking of low population density, the official definition of rural is 6 or less people per sq. mile. Okanogan county is 7.75 (41,194 in 5315 sq. mi.). If you get creative and remove the big metro center of Omak/Okanogan cities ( 7368 in 4.8 sq. mi.). the math comes to 6.4 people per square mile. Since you cannot have .4 people. round off and you have 6 per square mile. :) I would suspect that this valley is under 6 per square mile as there are other towns where population is denser, like Tonasket, Winthrop, Twisp, Methow, Conconully, Oroville, Brewster and Pateros to name a few.  So, take off another 4000 people over 15 square miles and from the equation and you get 5.6.
The picture with Okanogan county circled is from http://frontierus.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2010_Frontier_Counties_Map_fin062612.pdf. So we are officially designated as frontier.
Well, I have to make some dinner. Going simple tonight. Grilled swiss cheese on garlic sourdough bread if frontier hubby remembers to bring home the cheese. Mmmm, tasty.

 Welcome to my world,

Frontier Woman @ frontierlivingtoday.blogspot.com