I Loves Tick Season

Apparently every season is tick season here. I caught three ticks trying to find a good place to settle in and drink my hound's blood. And then I found three more that had already found a nice place to feed. Two had already begun to feed and were swelling up, they squished rather satisfyingly. And the last was a wee tick buried in her thick neck fur, it didn't want to let go and I, as always, had to be careful not to squish its body to inject whatever nasty toxins were inside it into my dog.

But it came off and got squished like the others.

And now, of course, I have phantom tick-itis, where it feels like there are ticks crawling on your skin all the time. In fact, I just went and checked my back in the mirror just to make sure.

I hate ticks, hate, hate, hate them.

Seven Ticks in One Walk

You know how a good headline pretty much tells the entire story and everything else is just details?

Well, this is a blog post that pretty much is summed up by its headline.

And now for the details. Nande and I went down for a walk this morning, before the sun baked off the fog cover and it got hot hot like it has been the last few days. Seriously, we've had scorchers lately.

It was after the kids were all in school and well before lunch so there was very little foot traffic and that means I was able to let Nande off leash so I could really run her a bit. The only problem is that the grasses are very tall right now and no other dogs or people run through to help break paths a bit.

Nande loves to run and loves games and one of her favorite game includes chasing thrown rocks. I can run her up and down the slough pretty easily. But there was danger lurking in the tall grass in the form of little nasty blood suckers. On one romp down and back, I noticed a spot on her thigh, I looked closer and it was crawling so I quickly grabbed it and squished it between two rocks. I saw another tick and killed it. And then another and another. Four ticks jumped aboard her on one run down and back.

Once dispatched we kept running some more, I made sure to check her carefully for more ticks but didn't find any.

When we were done the walk and run, we headed up to the house. After we'd been home for a good twenty minutes, I felt something on my back, scratched it and found a tick which died very quickly (pliers work very well but use a paper towel to prevent splatter). At this point, I had had more than enough of the ticks so I stripped down, checked the outside of my clothes and then the inside. And found another tick inside my shirt.

That's six ticks now. But the headline says seven ticks. The last one showed up an hour or two later, Nande showed it to me on her side and it got squished and flushed like the others.

Seven damned ticks in one walk, that was about seven more than I ever want to see again. I hate ticks because they suck!