Late at Night, While You're Sleeping. . .

. . .Poison Ivy comes a creepin' around.  (And she's a bitch.)

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Last Friday I thought I would keep myself busy all day without spending any money.  I was super productive around the house, and even took on a task that is supposed to be Matt's: I mowed the lawn.  Easy enough.  Just push the thing around the yard in lines.  I wore shorts and a tank top and flip-flops.  I did run over some plastic thing that shredded to bits and hit my leg and made me start to bleed, but aside from that, there seemed to be no other casualties.

After mowing the lawn, I took Mitch for a walk/jog to the park.  We didn't get far, though, because gigantic black storm clouds came rolling in, and lightning began to strike kind of close to us.  I kept having this awful vision of my little Mitchy getting struck by lightning in front of my face, so we went home before that would become reality. 

I was sweaty and gross, but then I was afraid to get into the shower because I had recently read this post by The Bloggess and I was afraid that I would get struck by lightning if I got in the shower and then Matt would come home to a fried wife and he would be sad.  So I fell asleep instead.  And then I woke up and Matt was home and we ate dinner and I drank too much wine.

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There was no shower.  And what good timing, since apparently I had walked through some poison ivy during my lawn-mowing endeavor (because, regardless of how many times I look at a picture of poison ivy, I can never recognize it in real life), and had opted out of the shower on the day that my body was covered in poison ivy oil.  Fantastic.  So it spread around, and instead of just having poison ivy on my feet, for example, I would scratch the back side of my knee, thus spreading the poison.  Again, fantastic. 

So now I'm covered in little patches of itchy hell, and I'm mad about it. 

It's a good thing that I went to the beach today, so that I could have some healing salt water to help out. (I thought that was just some myth that my grandma would tell me, but today I talked to my biologist friend Jen who told me that salt water does, indeed, help out poison ivy because it's a hypertonic.  She explained what that meant, but I forgot.) 

Between today's healing salt water, and the healing dog kisses that I'm sure Mitch will be providing (since I saved his life during Friday's walk/jog), I'll be better in no time. 

I hear that margaritas have that special healing power, too.

Mega Loser!

Ugh, I am so bad at the lottery!

Sigh. I guess I'll just go to work on Monday.

There's always a next time, always room for improvement.

Opossums will STILL kill you.

I'm still rattled by tonight's events. Mitch, recipient of K9 Advantix (There ain't no bugs on him?), spent about 30 minutes in the back yard tonight, just doing general dog stuff: smelling stuff, peeing on stuff, barking at the occasional passersby. In the hot and muggy summer months, Mitch doesn't usually stay outside for that long, and I thought it curious that he hadn't been barking to come inside. I also found it odd that he was in a part of the yard where he never seems to spend much time. Hmph.

When he came inside the house he started shaking his head like crazy and scratching, and when I took a close look at him, I could see fleas crawling across his face and all over the fronts of his little dog arms. Naturally, Mitch wasn't a fan of the fleas, so I spent the next hour of my life like a monkey, picking fleas off of the dog and squeezing them to death. I probably picked about 40-50 fleas off of him. And during that time I was racking my brain, trying to figure out how Mitch, who was wearing pretty powerful flea medication (so powerful that it gave me a rash last week), could suddenly have this many fleas on him.

I immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario, that Mitch had contracted some rare form of rabies that rendered flea medicine ineffective, and that he was going to bite me and give me the rabies and then Matt would get home and it'd be like that awful scene from the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

And then Matt got home, and I had a more reasonable thought, that perhaps there was some weird concentration of fleas in the yard, in the odd spot where Mitch had been spending so much time. I made Matt go with me to the yard, and I used the light from my phone to illuminate parts that were too dark.

I made out something cordlike that didn't look like the rest of the grass.

And then I saw it, there it was, a dead decomposing baby opossum!

And I screamed like mad and threw my arms in the air and ran back to the house, wriggling my body to rid myself of the grossness.

That was about an hour ago, and I can't stop thinking about it and I can't stop scratching myself all over.

It's a good thing you're cute, dog.

It's a good thing [for the dog] that his ears and little dog expressions melt my heart. Otherwise, Mitch would be back at the pound. Allow me to share with you an experience from the last few days. . .

1. Mandy sees a flea on Mitch.

2. Mandy decides to put flea medicine on Mitch.

3. Mandy opens the dog medicine drawer.

4. Mitch bolts.

5. Mandy corners Mitch in the bedroom, and applies medicine to the back of his little dog neck while he sits on the bed.

6. Mitch spends the next 3 minutes trying to rid himself of flea medicine by flopping around on the bed, rubbing the back of his neck all over the sheets.

7. Mandy thinks nothing of this.

8. Mandy is also really bad about showering daily.

9. Mandy goes to bed.

10. Mandy wakes up with rash all over her arm.

11. Mandy thinks nothing of this, other than about how much it itches.

12. Mandy does nothing [but scratch].

13. Mandy goes to bed again, having not showered that day.

14. Mandy wakes up with a rash that has spread all up and down her arm, and must wait tables with said rash.

15. Dammit.

16. Mandy realizes that rash is most likely a result of the flea medicine that is labeled with approximately 1 million warnings.

17. Mandy finally takes a shower.

18. Rash is starting to go away.

19. F'ing dog gave me a rash! Now I'm dirty rash girl!

20. Maybe this (like the sunburn I got last summer that made my face swell and my eyes turn squinty made me wear sunscreen) will actually make me see the value in showering daily.