Ticks

Living right at the edge of the hardwood forest and the tall grass prairie, we have all kinds of animals and pests. One that a lot of people think about this time of year is the Tick. Those pesky little insects will latch on to you every time you go out unprotected. There is a place in the garage where the floor looks dark from all the over spray from each time Barb goes out. I would love to be the official tick inspector but she claims to be able to handle the task herself.

I think there is some official life cycle where they spend some time on the bunnies and some time on deer, but the real problem here is the dogs. I have them sprayed, dipped and collared against the tick but I see them all the time no matter what. The life cycle that I cannot abide is any time on a human host. The good thing is that the dogs spend all their time outside so at least I don't have them bringing them into the house.

One of the blogs I read is from a lady in Colorado. She claims she hasn't seen a tick since she moved there. For most of my life the only place I ever got a tick was in Colorado or in Arkansas. Now that we live in the trees we see them all the time. There was a disease that people only got when they went walking out in the high forests in Colorado and that was Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick fever. It is now common in Arkansas and getting more so here in Kansas. It is a disease that gives you flu like symptoms. It can cause liver disease and I'm sure that my father was not treated well back in the early 70's. In 1972 as I went to summer camp at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas we spent the weekend with Mom and Dad up near Rogers. Dad was in the middle of his two week Beech Craft shutdown and had spent most of the first week out mowing and cutting brush . He had several of what we now call bulls eyes around tick bites and in spite of the 90 degree weather sat shivering under a blanket on the porch. Oh if we had only known then what we know now.

The repairs on the Buick ran almost $900.00 and that didn't fix the very minor head gasket leak. Next month.

MUD