In Texas, a porch is only comfortable for a few months a year. Once the summer heat strikes, it's pretty unbearable to linger long, and soon you find yourself fleeing for the relative comfort of climate control. In addition, my house is situated near an arroyo which appears to house a large and particularly blood-thirsty colony of mosquitoes.

Sadly, as a result of this two-strike situation, our great big porch has gone mostly unused for the three years we've lived in the house. But wait, there's a solution and it's so basic I don't know why we didn't do this before. We wired up a ceiling fan.

Actually, when we bought the house, it had a fan on the porch. But as with the rest of the house, the wiring was very old and faulty so we disconnected it and never looked back. This is a regretable oversight, and one we're correcting...well, now. This summer we will back our porch.

Last week we found a nice big fan at Home Depot and wired it up. It required two evenings of attic crawling in order to run new wiring to the unit, so it's a good thing we're tackling this project in May rather than August. Anyway, with the wire in place Errek then swapped out the old fan with our new 60" unit. It's very big and one it's highest setting more closely resembles a propeller.

When the time came to test it, Errek set it on high and watched with glee as three flies who'd previously been buzzing his head experienced an incest-sized micro-burst, lost lift and had to make emergency landings to avoid crashing.

For two days now we've been enjoying our newly cooled and insect-unfriendly outdoor living space. It's a novel experience to sit on our porch now. It used to be we'd find two mosquitoe bites for every five minutes spent outdoors, but on Friday night I had just one bite and we sat out there for three hours.

It's funny how something so basic and easily overlooked, can mean the difference between comfort and West Nile virus.

Now, we just need some comfy porch chairs and a little grill for our porch paradise to be fully ready for the impending summer swelter.

Okay Texas, bring it on.