screening for bugs

It's a shame that we have such a large insect population. There are times when I would love to just open our windows at night. We do have screens on them, but I find that certain bugs are getting in through the screens, mostly those small obnoxious fruit flies that see to sprout from nowhere. In fact, I've had bags of fruit waste that were airtight, and somehow they end up with fruit flies in them. It's almost as if the flies had laid eggs in the fruit before we disposed of them, which makes me wonder if we're not consuming fly larvae when we eat fresh fruit. Ugh.

Our home has those neat double hung windows, so that you can open either the top or the bottom. The screen covers the entire window, which is good for keeping out insects, but bad for taking photographs. We get lots of types of wildlife that come very close to our home, sometimes close enough to warrant a photograph. Unfortunately the screen renders most of my through-window shots fuzzy. It's a shame because I love the double hung windows, but I hate the fact that the screen covers the entire window. There's no way that I would be able to get this close to a deer with my camera without a window and slightly angled faux wood blinds between us.

For anyone with small children, I would heartily recommend double hung windows. We were often concerned about our toddler pushing out the window screen and falling out, but with double hung windows you can open the top half of the window (which is out of his reach). When my daughter was little, she used to drive me crazy by pushing out the screen for our french doors leading to the backyard. I couldn't stand having to reposition that little black rubber strip to try and get the screen back in place, because it never turned out right. There was always some slack in the screen after that, and I knew that at some point she would just walk up and push it out all over again.