at first i thought it was poison ivy.
i just wrote a flyer about trying new things, which i’ve done a bit of lately. i neglected to mention the flip side of trying new things, and that would be the new nasty BUGS i’ve run into. well, i have mentioned the tics.
i thought i had poison ivy from camping. But B., former boy scout who knows most things about most things in nature, said nope, they must be chiggers. i must have got them when i was thrashing around the the weeds in his yard, trying to eliminate all weeds from everywhere.
chiggers are very bad. i’m not entirely clear about them; are they actually down there IN MY LEGS right now, burrowing around? B. said that they are. but here’s what i found online about them:
Contrary to common belief, it does not penetrate and burrow into the skin or suck blood. Instead, it injects a digestive fluid that disintegrates skin cells so they can be used as food. A feeding “tube” formed by the chigger secretion and skin cells of the host permits the chigger to extract food until it is engorged. After leaving the host, it undergoes further development on the ground.
Affected skin tissue becomes red and swollen. It may completely envelop the feeding chigger, making the chigger appear to be burrowing into the skin. Chigger bites have a more severe effect on some persons than others. The bite itches intensely and may continue itching for several days after the chigger is killed or drops off. The itching probably results from the digestive action of the enzymes injected by the larva into the skin.
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so it kind of sounds like the chiggers might be gone. i’m going to stick with that, because the thought of them BURROWING AROUND INSIDE MY LEGS is too disgusting to think about.
other people also said they’re burrowing. sharon, who used to work with my mom, said i should put clear nail polish on them in order to suffocate them. christine said she used to get chiggers all the time when she was a kid, and they smeared them with pink calamine lotion to smother them. this is back when she was a tomboy and played outside a lot. as opposed to now, when she’s cleverly eliminated any danger of any bugs at all by avoiding the outside altogether.
actually, she says she waters the flowers for her landlady at her apartment. sometimes i’ll call her and she’ll be outside watering, which is extraordinary to think of. christine outside, it’s a rare occurrence.
anyway, there is now clear nail polish all around my legs. i did this last night, and my sleep wasn’t disturbed. but this morning i went running and after i’d gone about 10 minutes, i was ready to stop and rip off my socks and start scratching like crazy because they were KILLING me.
i tried to think of other things, and made it back home with my legs intact somehow.
i applied yet more nail polish and right now they don’t feel bad and i’m assuming they’ve all at least been smothered, if they were actually there anyway, and maybe the itching will go away soon. i think i’m extra-allergic to itching things – when i lived in texas, the fire ants were the worst ever, worse than poison ivy, even, because they itched literally forever. even after the bite was just a scab and hardly visible. i worry sometimes (when i can’t think of anything else to worry about, so at least i don’t worry about them very much) about the inevitability of the fire ants marching up to springfield.
perhaps at that point i’ll have to flee again, maybe to alaska, where surely it’s too cold for there to be bad bugs lurking all about. but then again there would be all those months of darkness and bitter cold and snow…
it’s always something.
those photos from ireland, by the way, were a trip that I, personally, didn’t go on.
must travel soon.
i’ve been trying to find tickets for “wicked,” and all i can find right now are ones that are at the very edges of the rows. i wondered why they’d all been sold already, but then i started checking around on google, and found a whole bunch of “discount” ticket brokers. all these places seem to have plenty of good seats in or near the middle, but the tickets are over TWICE AS MUCH as the ones on ticketmaster. this seems rather outrageous to me. why should these places get to scoop up all the prime seats, so the public is forced to sit way out on the edges, or else cough up ridiculous amounts of money?
not that everything is annoying today.
i’ve been quietly sitting here for five minutes, trying to think of something not annoying.
so far, no luck.
awfully surly for friday morning.
i have to give a bunch of massages this afternoon, and i’m tired and my hands hurt. i also keep scraping them up, which i must not do, because then the massages are kind of painful.
i just noticed a chiger bite on my arm. B. assures me they can’t climb up inside my skin to my arm, but how did it get there, then?
one not annoying thing, one not annoying thing…
must thing of one thing.
ok then,
grace in need of an attitude adjustment right now.