Wanna See What a Tick Bite Looks Like?

An infected woodtick bite is about the size of a nickel.

After about five days of antibiotics, the mark had cleared up pretty much completely. But before that, everyone who saw it exclaimed, "Ewwww!"

The prescription needs to be finished so I'm still taking the damn things. And eating yogurt. And drinking minimal coffee and booze. BTW, those Smirnoff's Vodka Ice coolers are vunderbar. As soon as these pills are gone, I'm a-goin' to go buy me some.

And there are still ticks around. I caught one on me yesterday and Scott is still pulling them ("fat ones") off Jenna Doodle in spite of the treatments we have given to our dogs to prevent bites.

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Joan and her family stopped in for a couple hours yesterday on their way to Saskatoon to visit friends before heading back to Kelowna. In the evening I transplanted strawberries from pots into the garden (yes, we have a vegetable garden area again!) and today it's time to start putting this place back in order. I've been on the go long enough to let things slide. And we won't even talk about the condition of my office and bedroom; they need some serious sorting and reorganization, long overdue. I have too many clothes (love clothes) and too many books (love books) and too many papers to dispose of. We're living in controlled chaos here, my friends — bad feng shui! Call it what you will, but it absolutely does affect my state of mind when there isn't cleanliness and order in my surroundings. I'm not particularly fussy, or shooting for perfection or fancyness, but I like things tidy and want to quickly find whatever I'm looking for.

Scott gets irritated when I've put things away that he's left lying about. Put them away yourself then, I tell him; or suck it up and be grateful you don't have to live among piles of "stuff." Without me, he'd have to push grocery flyers, newspapers and envelopes out of the way whenever he sat down at the kitchen table.

He gets even more irritated when I can't immediately remember where I've put something, or don't remember seeing it at all. Sometimes he's put it away himself and forgotten, and I get blamed. Ah, the trials and tribulations of domestic life! But it doesn't slow me down any when I get into a cleaning frenzy. As my friend Rod used to say when his wife didn't appreciate all the hours he spent out in his woodworking shop, "I could have worse habits. It's not as if I'm spending all my time in the bar, is it?" I liked his logic.

Once in a while Scott threatens to clean up my stuff, and see how I like it. I just laugh. That'll be the day. He can barely pick his own socks off the floor before he runs out of them and has no choice. Here my behaviour may seem a little contradictory, for I refuse to put his dirty clothing into the laundry basket. Instead, if they've lain on the floor of our shared bedroom for more than a week or two, which drives me nuts, and I get around to it, I have been known to stuff them into a black garbage bag and put them in a closet out of sight. As a matter of fact, he still hasn't gone through a bag that's been sitting in a spare room for the past three months, if not longer. One day it could just disappear altogether, and apparently he would never notice anything is missing.