Tiny Squares

So a while back, we had gone to New Jersey and taken a hike in the woods. We wore long pants and sleeves, and checked ourselves carefully for ticks on our return. No ticks.

We stayed the weekend in New Jersey, and returned home. The morning after our return, I was in the shower, and noticed what looked like a poppy seed on my right hip bone. Hmmm. I went to brush it off, and it stayed put. Giving it a little tug, it came off. I put it on the ledge in my shower, not thinking too much about it. When I had toweled off, I gave it a peek - still looked like a poppy seed. After placing it on a pice of paper, lo and behold, it started moving. Yuck. Mind you, this is a full 3 days after our hike in the woods...

So I bagged up the little offender, and we gave each other a very careful once over. No ticks.

Next morning, I woke up, and decided to give the spot where the tick had been a look to see if the bite had done anything. The bite was fine, but I was horrified to discover a poppy seed about 2 inches to the right of where the first one had been. And on further inspection, he had a little friend on the other side of my waist as well. Hmmmm.

So we bagged my new little friends, and gave everybody a check. The Professor and Big Trouble remained uninhabited, but Miss Serious also had a little friend, which got its own special bag. We delivered all of the bags to our respective doctors for testing, and tried to figure out what exactly was happening. I decided to vacuum the heck out of the apartment,  and wash everything that was washable. And then we thought of the dog.

The dog had stayed the weekend with friends who have a backyard while we were away. so our first thought was that he had gotten ticks from the yard and brought them home to visit. We took him to the vet, and decided to toss out many of the items that he liked to sleep on, one of which was the sock yarn blanket I had made. To be fair, it did have several squares that had rips in them, because some of the yarn I used wasn't sock yarn and wasn't as strong as the others. Three hundred dollars later, we learned that the dog had no ticks, and I immediately regretted getting rid of the blanket, as well as having given all those dollars to the vet.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to start another one:

I've been working on it for a while, and now it looks like this:

It's nowhere near as big as the one I tossed, but hopefully it will be someday. And of course, tick free.

Coronation Day

So it's official. I've entered my elder years. I know this, because I have now had to endure the kind of dental work I only ever heard my grandparents talk about.

About 10 years ago, while camping in Connecticut, I broke a molar while eating one of the mushiest foods ever, a soft, cheesy breadstick. After breaking off a chunk of said tooth,  Miss Serious and Big Trouble insisted that I leave it under my pillow. The next morning, as the sun rose over our little tent, I reached under my pillow and discovered a dollar bill that had been torn in half. The Professor must have his little jokes....

Upon returning to Chez Necessity, my dentist put a sort of wall around the tooth, and basically gave my a gigantic filling. He stated, not in a particularly comforting way, "It might work."  It did, but my new dentist has been eyeing it since I started seeing him, and finally convinced me that I would rather take care of it on my own terms rather than when it breaks (and he assured me that it definitely would).

My dentist is an older, Russian gentleman with an accent so thick that everything he says sounds like a Dostoyevsky novel. I did not quite understand what getting a crown entailed, and would have enjoyed remaining blissfuly ignorant, but after he finished drilling my tooth, he gave me a mirror so I could see what he had done. Appalled, I gazed at the nub of what used to be a tooth that he had created in my mouth. He stuck the temporary crown on top of this horror, and sent me on my way.

Two weeks later, weeks in which I learned that it is possible to only chew on one side of your mouth,  I returned for the permanent crown. I was thinking of asking him if I could have it bejeweled, but I decided that it is unwise to kid around with the person who holds the dental drill. After my second shot of novocaine (the first one served only to numb my neck, an odd sensation at the best of times), my permanent crown was attached to my little tooth nub, and now lives with me forever. I'm feeling more royal already - maybe I'll pick up a Corgi.