I do not have a witty and entertaining blog topic to write about this week. Instead, I have a list of excuses as to why I couldn’t come up with something funny for your reading pleasure. Here they are:

1.  A tick bit me two weeks ago. Burrowed right in and made my left butt cheek its new home. Though it has since been extracted and no bull’s-eye has formed around the bite, I am suffering from the devastating effects of psychosomatic Lyme disease. These symptoms include: general crankiness (must be the tick bite), pain in my knee (sure, this happens every time it rains, but this time I’m convinced it’s Lyme), and an alarming shortage of blog post ideas.
2. I was too busy practicing the perfect selfie smile (see photo below).
3. I had a dream the other night that I owned a baby goat. This might be because the lawn is too long, and in my dream this adorable baby goat was doing a great job with grass maintenance. My point is, I wasted all my writing time searching for free baby goats on Craig’s List.
4. I decided that this week was the week to cross "build a fort out of cotton balls" off of my bucket list. The good news: it's soft and makes me sleepy. The bad news: I grind my teeth when I sleep. Have you ever ground down on a cotton ball? Traumatizing!
5. Maybe I just didn’t feel like writing anything this week. 
6. I bought a home waxing kit, and subsequently passed out for three days from the pain.
7. I’ve been ignoring Daylight Savings Time for the past fifteen years, and it finally caught up with me. I thought this was last week, when I already had a blog idea.
8.  I saw Jurassic World, and have been spending all my free time sewing tiny velociraptor costumes for the cats.
9.  I was busy writing a scathing letter to the people in charge of Microsoft Word, demanding that their spellcheck feature recognize “velociraptor” as a real word.
10. The word “apanthropinization” is now officially obsolete. I decided to mourn this loss by actively doing it.

There you go. I also learned an important lesson: thinking up excuses about why I wasn't writing a blog post was about as much work as actually writing one. I had to look up "apanthropinization," pester my best writing friend for help when I got stuck on number six, stop to watch videos of adorable baby goats . . . I'm exhausted. 
Must be the psychosomatic Lyme disease.

It’s tick season again, and if you’re like me, you hate those bloodthirsty little parasites (who doesn't?). Luckily for you, gentle reader, I’ve had quite a bit of experience in removing ticks, having grown up on a farm with lots of long grass around (we called it “hay”) and from living in the very state that holds the town for which Lyme disease was named. I have more ticks than dandelions in my back yard. When those vampiric goons dig in, here’s what you need to do to get rid of them:

1.     Get out the peanut butter. There’s a popular old wives’ tale that says if you put peanut butter over a tick, the peanut butter will start to smother the little bugger, and he’ll release his lockjaw bite on your flesh. This is a total lie. The peanut butter is for the snack you’ll want before this is over.

2.     Find a pair of needle-tip tweezers. Nothing but needle-tip will do. I can’t stress this enough. Regular tweezers will cause you to rip off the tick’s abdomen, leaving its filthy, diseased head still firmly burrowed under your skin. Tick heads are infinitely more difficult to remove than whole ticks.

3.     Place the tips of the tweezers as close to your skin and the tick’s hellspawn pincers as possible, squeeze, and gently start pulling. Slowly, slooowly . . . pop! What the—didn’t I TELL you not to use regular tweezers? Now you’ve got a tick belly leaking your freshly sucked blood all over the place, and a half a tick still stuck in you. What happens next is of your own making, pal!

4.     Start sharpening the filleting knife. You’ve got a tick head that’s got to come out, my friend, and the only way to do that is to cut it out. Regretting not splurging on the needle-tip tweezers now, aren’t you?

5.     Using your crappy regular tweezers, pull on the tick head hard enough to pull your skin away from your body. I know it’s gross. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

6.     Use the filleting knife to gently saw away at the two points where the tick pincers have a death-lock grip on your skin. Luckily, I’ve found that the person with the tick often passes out from the pain at some point during the process, which makes it easier to saw.

7.     The heck with it. When “gentle” fails to get you very far, just start hacking away. You’re going to wind up with a hole in your skin anyway, might as well gouge it out yourself. Continue to do this until the chunk of skin with the tick head still embedded separates from your body.

8.     Stuff the gaping, bleeding hole that remains with gauze. Don’t use cotton. Hey! You saw what happened when you ignored my tweezers advice, didn’t you? Put that cotton ball down!

9.     Collect the tick abdomen and tick head (with your flesh still attached) and bring it to the doctor. Put it in a safe container, like an old pill bottle. Don’t worry, you’ll get a new pill bottle when the doctor prescribes antibiotics for you.

10. Enjoy a spoonful of peanut butter. Go ahead. You’ve earned it, and you’ll have a battle scar for the rest of your life to show for it.