Please allow me to interject my feelings about Mother Nature

Finally getting some much-needed rain in Mississippi. We've picked up about an inch over the past week, which isn't nearly as much as we need but it's better than nothing. I can probably count on one hand the number of times it's rained since July, and that's not hyperbole at all.

 

I can as well, but when one of those rains is a 9"+ gullywasher, you just thank the bounty of Tebow and hope the lakes caught it.

 

Well, you see, the warming of the planet dramatically increases the length of mosquito season and allows the expansion of diseases such as malaria. In this Ted Talk, I will explain how - if for no other reason - climate change must be mitigated due to the skeeters.

 

Make sure you talk about the ticks, too.

 

Man, the deer ticks on the buck I got last Saturday were HUGE. Normally you might see one or two in the crease where their leg joins their torso. But there were two on his ears and a couple on his exposed belly - places they couldn't survive after a hard freeze.

 

Unrelated, I'm damn sad that I missed the band Deer Tick last night in D.C. Just couldn't swing a Tuesday night with a heavy workload yesterday and today. Setlist looked great.

 

Don't get lyme disease.

 

Don't get into a bunch of seed ticks. You will not like where you find them.

 

When I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 or 6, I had a tick locked in on my sack.
Yeah. You heard that right. On. MY. SACK!
My dad held me down - no, pinned me down - while my mom got it off.
I was less than a happy camper.

 

When I was in maybe the eighth grade we lived out in the sticks. Some wasps built a nest inside a birdhouse in the front yard and we didn't know about it until it was pretty big. Lots of wasps. My dad built a fire about five feet in front of it, and the plan was to knock the birdhouse off the tree and throw it into the fire quickly. This was my dad and I, and then my little brother came and got involved as well.

We had a Chesapeake Retriever, big ol' hound dog, much like a Lab. He got curious and excited about all the goings on in the front yard so he jumped the fence in the back yard and came to join us about the time my dad used a stick to knock the birdhouse down. Wasps everywhere very quickly. Dad kicked the birdhouse into the fire but there were a bunch of angry wasps buzzing around so we backed away. About that time one of them lit on our dog's sack and stung him. He yelped and ran and dropped on the ground and started scooting along on his belly, trying to get it off of him. It wouldn't come off and we're trying to get to him to help him (and laughing our asses off, we couldn't help it) and he gets up and takes off running as fast as he can, yelping about every second jump. No way in hell to catch him.

He finally runs himself out, comes back to us and flops on the ground on his back and basically said "Help me, boss. Get this damn thing off of me", and we did. I laughed till I cried, but I also felt a lot of sympathy for him. I can't imagine...

 

Sack? Meh. Get one on your little head and get back to me.