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.