Ticked off

I went on a hike with my girlfriend, Rae Dawn, last Thursday. ( A hike that I normally ride when I take my horse out on the weekend.) I decided to be adventurous and led Rae Dawn on a little bushwhacking to get to the creek because I knew it flowed nearby. It was great. The dog stayed with us the whole time and we discovered these stacked stones that someone had left and realized that they were the gateway to this beautiful part of the creek. It had several small pools flanked by boulders we could climb and hop around on. It was magical. I felt great. My girlfriend's fat-burner meter watch read that she had burned 400 calories (Therefore I had too, right?) and my goals of slipping into a bikini before August seemed almost reasonable. We came home exhilarated.

Shortly after that all hell broke loose. I felt something crawling along the nape of my neck and ran my hands through my hair. My fingers zeroed in on something crawling and I pulled it out to discover A HUGE TICK. Ugh. I thought that was it, until Rae Dawn told me to lift my shirt up so that she could make sure it was the only one. I did as I was ordered and, I swear, about 8 of those parasites fell to the kitchen floor and started to scatter away. I was screaming, trying to gather them up and exterminate them, when Rae Dawn told me to stop moving and not panic. Nancy (my babysitter) took one look at my back and said "Oh, that's not good," and by then I'm in silent freak-out mode thinking I"m in some bad remake of Anaconda, the movie. I had two more tics imbeded in my back and Rae Dawn came to the rescue and grabbed one of our prized bottles of Tequila. I was thinking, "Cool, I could really use a shot," and she laid the open bottle straight onto my back and covered the tic with it. (Not what I had in mind!) About thirty seconds later, she pulled the (now drunk) tic off my back and repeated the process again with the second one. Finally released from the grasp of these parasites, all my modesty flew out the window and I stripped in the middle of the kitchen and ran to the bathroom to shower. In retrospect, I can only imagine the visual the babysitter was left with because I found out that Rae Dawn did the same thing, only she didn't immediately run away. She had poor Nancy check her over, standing in front of her in her birthday suit!

I was thinking this little nightmare was behind me until I woke up the next day to see these enormous bites on my rib cage. Just so you have the correct visual, they were swollen about two inches in diameter. I know this because I drove myself to Urgent Care (The same place you can get Botox injections on an emergency basis.) The doctor took one look at me and prescribed oral antibiotics four times a day for the next seven days. Thank God for Keflex.So much for wanting to be active and healthy. Let's just say this little episode left me really ticked off!

Is-a-bitten
PS The pictures are of Jack, Makena and Jack's friends: Skyler and Caelan at the "survivor" party their teacher threw for completing third grade.