Chatter Boxes

The last week has been chocked full of benadryl and hydrocortisone cream. I experienced my first attack of merciless chiggers. They are mean! I was standing around on Saturday waiting for stain to dry and thought, "oh, I'll go change the horse's water". I headed to the back field, dumped his water tub and then spent about 30 minutes scrubbing it out while standing in flooded grass. I believe this is when the attack occurred.

I woke up Sunday morning and found one bite on my hip...then another one...then another one. I had 5 total. Not bad I thought. By Sunday evening I had 53. By Monday morning 59 and that's when I stopped counting.


I looked them up to see if I needed to boil my bedsheets and found this statement. "Chiggers do not burrow under your skin, as many people believe, they actually feed on the fluids in skin cells. To get the fluids, they attach themselves to a skin pore or hair follicle and inject a digestive enzyme that ruptures the cells. The enzyme also hardens the surrounding skin tissue, forming a sort of straw for sucking the skin cell fluids" Pretty huh? The bites often are located in rather inappropriate places to be scratching when in the company of others. Great! I've only been caught once by the vice president of the hospital where I work. He pretended not to see anything and I'm choosing to believe he didn't.


"Wednesday work day" was a soggy one. We both worked our real jobs during the day and worked on the house in the evening. My parents joined us. The rain was pouring down most of the time so, after pulling my car out of the mud, we worked on the inside. John and Dad installed insulation while mom and I scrubbed the inside walls so we could stain them.


Mom checked on her garden which is growing like crazy! We "harvested" two fat cucumbers, two tiny pea pods, and one stubby carrot. I'll post pictures when mom figures out how to get them downloaded from her new digital camera. Don't wait up...that could be awhile.


We're also experiencing the hatching of eggs that have been laid in our rafters. The nests were started before the roof was finished so now they find themselves trapped. Momma bird was not pleased with our presence at all on Saturday and now we know why. I shuffled one baby bird out of our house and into the world last night. I hope the rest get out somehow.

John and I are headed on a whirlwind 6 day vacation. I can't talk about the first half yet, it's a secret mission. I'll tell you when we get back. The second half will be to chigger-infested Oklahoma to see John's parents. Someone from OK told me that's where they originated. Not to worry...I'll be armed with enough insect repellent to take out the evil chigger army. And John's mom is an expert in insect control...she won't let anything bad happen to me.