Friday, September 21

Too Pretty To Stay Inside!

This is it. This is the good stuff. This is windows-wide-open, feet-up-on-the-porch-rail, run-until-you-drop-just-because-you-can weather. This is the weather where you can drink coffee and not feel the need to justify it, or face the wiggly eyebrows of others as they glance between your steaming mug and the thermometer outside. This is the weather that makes me want to read interesting books, write thoughtful letters, and spend idle days in the woods with good company.  This. is. good.


The boys went hiking last weekend with their Troop. Awesome boys. Awesome Scout leaders. Everything you could want in Scouting. They had a great time. We saw some of the most beautiful flora, and... interesting fauna.

Could have done with a little less of the latter, to be honest. But you take Nature as she is, and, well, sometimes she's a little creepy. We've all been there. I don't judge.


I won't regale you with the tick story. Just trust me when I say I was thisclose to agreeing to up and move in the middle of the night. I hear the Arctic is nice this time of year... Also, two thousand mg of garlic daily is *not* enough to keep seed ticks off of you. Nor is DEET. Nor is any possible combination of the two. And those bastards can *bite*. Wow. (I'm sorry. That sounded judgey. OK, maybe I will judge. You bite my kids, you get no love. That's just how it goes.)


We haven't ridden or hiked much this week, what with the open wounds on our feet and ankles. (The toes! Every toe is covered! Ew!) Mostly we've just hobbled about in flip-flops with our pants rolled up, a cotton ball in one hand and a bottle of Calahist in the other. Got a lot of reading done, though, which was great. Again with the balcony love. (Seriously, if you have the opportunity to have a balcony, grab it, folks. If I'd known how much we would use ours, we might have put it in before we did the kitchen cabinets. Love!)

But today, the call of "highs in the 70's" lured us back out onto the trail...
It really is just too pretty to stay inside.

Kiss those babies!
~Dy

3 comments:

Kathy said...

oh my, I don't think I have ever seen seed ticks. What a horrible experience. Hope everyone is doing better now.

Dy said...

Kathy, seed ticks are the larval stage of ticks - when they've hatched, and are awaiting their first good feed. They're *tiny* - I can't begin to tell you how tiny. Some of them we only found because freckles don't move. We think we got into them when we found a clay pit and stood around it long enough that the nest nearby emptied onto all those warm, healthy bodies. Blech.

John's not feeling 100%. If he still isn't by Monday, I'll take him in to the doc and we'll do the Lyme preventative dance. :fingers crossed:

Kathy said...

Blech on those ticks. Do hope that John is feeling better! Can seed ticks transmit lyme disease too? :(