a half an hour ago, at his usual time of 4:30 a.m., chester marched into the bedroom and started his plaintive meowing. i tried to ignore him, deciding that i wasn’t going to succumb to his sorrowful cries, but i finally staggered out of bed and shut the door so he couldn’t come back in.
but then…my forearm was itching. i’ve been getting so many mosquito bites lately that my friend bev would be in a state of extreme panic at the threat of west nile virus, but as i itched my arm i realized that this definitely wasn’t a measly little mosquito bite.
poison ivy, and lots of it. uh oh. last night at dinner i was bragging about how i’d escaped the poison ivy, even though i’d been standing on the edge of a gigantic crop of it. and then, picking up poor scared roxie…
luckily, i had just asked for my cream of prescription-strength poison ivy cream from randy – i lent it to him a few weeks ago because he thought he had poison ivy, but i don’t think it was. it expired in march 2013, but i have every confidence that it will still be effective.
if not, things won’t be pretty around here for a while.
and now, as i sit here in the dark (and for some reason chester continues to wail even though he’s been fed plus i’m here with him and he’s not alone so he needs to just calm down already) waiting for the cream to dry so i can go back to sleep, i just hope that more poison ivy won’t show up. because i picked up roxie and carried her, and of course i was wearing a sleeveless exercise shirt, my favorite one with the bright birds and flowers on it, so the poison could easily pop out all over my upper arm, too.
and for that matter, it could show up in a whole bunch of other places…i vigorously scrubbed all over with the tecnu poison ivy wash on thursday night, but you’re supposed to scrub for 2 whole minutes, and then rinse and repeat. and i didn’t have a clock in the shower, so i kept counting “one mississippi, two mississippi,” because i was pretty sure that was an accurate count of the seconds.
but since i had to do this over and over, on my arms, on my legs, on my whole body, i didn’t make it all the way to “a hundred and twenty mississippi.”
patience is a virtue that i don’t have enough of.
someday i would like to make it through a summer without getting poison ivy.
of course, if i hadn’t picked up the dog who had been burrowed in the poison ivy patch, i wouldn’t have it.
but i don’t regret it for a minute.
boy, i’m tired right now. i guess i could just stay up for an hour or less, however long it take for the sun to rise, because i’m sure it’ll be beautiful.
the sunrise is a spectacular thing, but i really wish it came a little later in the day.
good night.
mrs. itchy hughes.