I think we can all agree that the tick is best known as the most widely hated bug in the entire arachnid kingdom. Don’t even try to argue that spiders are worse: most spiders don’t seek you out to suck your blood and give you horrible diseases (the exception, of course, is Shelob, the great spider in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but she’s it--and spoiler alert: she doesn’t exist in real life). Ticks are creepy, bacteria-filled vampires that serve no purpose in the circle of life except to instill a heart-stopping case of heebie jeebies in all that encounter them. Listen, I can justify the existence of just about anything in this world. War, famine, giant wasps the size of Buicks (for you spider haters out there, those Buick wasps help control the Buick tarantula population, so perhaps you should start thanking them now). But I cannot justify ticks. Sure, maybe they’re a main staple of the guinea hen’s diet, but otherwise, they’re pointless and rotten. And guinea hens could surely find something else to eat, right?
We’ve all heard that the tick population is especially bad this year. One website even likened it to a George Clooney movie, stating, “Health and insect experts are calling it a perfect storm of conditions coming together to create a tick population explosion.” That’s right, people: the ticks are so bad this year they’re expected to swarm our fishing boats and sink them to the bottom of the ocean floor, drowning all aboard before the hapless sailors even have time to whip out their fine-tipped tweezers.
Or something like that.
About a month ago, Jason had the misfortune of waking me up in the middle of the night. All who have done this know it is dangerous and unwise. I curse (I don’t just mean I say bad words: I utter curses proven to bring about cases of the pox, boils, and my favorite, leaky bowels), I cry, I scream, I throw things. I do not like being woken up. But he had no choice: he had a tick on his shoulder, and having grown up on a farm where tick removal was a part of everyday life, I’m the designated tick-puller in our house. It’s a job title I’ve never aspired to, but it turns out when you develop a pattern of cursing people with leaky bowels, karma tends to throw it right back at you by making you the tick wrangler of the house. So there I was at three a.m., pulling a tick off my husband. I was not amused.
Full disclosure: though I hate the darn things, I’m kind of proud of my tick-removing abilities. I can usually get them out quickly, getting head, pincers, and a bit of flesh in one tweezered tug. Maybe two. This was a two-tugger, then we burned the little parasitic demon, and I went back to bed. I was not yet worried about the predicted Tickageddon. Ticks happen, right?
Except they keep happening. They’re all over, and we’re finding them in the house—hanging on the front door, knocking with their nasty pint-size pincers, or on the shower curtain. I found one on Pugsley last night, and both he and his sister are indoor cats. We’re bringing them in on our clothes—and it’s been too rainy to work in the yard the past two weeks, so they must be hitching a ride on our socks and pants when we’re walking from our cars to the door. Either that, or we’ve got mice in our house that are bringing them in (in which case, Pugsley is to blame for his own tick: it wouldn’t have happened if he did his job and acted like a cat).
I have to work for a living. I can’t be spending every day yanking out ticks. I asked Jason to look into a tick lawn treatment service. He did, and quoted me a price. Apparently, the explosive tick population has also caused an explosion in lawn service treatment costs.
You know, I’ve always liked guinea hens.
We’ve all heard that the tick population is especially bad this year. One website even likened it to a George Clooney movie, stating, “Health and insect experts are calling it a perfect storm of conditions coming together to create a tick population explosion.” That’s right, people: the ticks are so bad this year they’re expected to swarm our fishing boats and sink them to the bottom of the ocean floor, drowning all aboard before the hapless sailors even have time to whip out their fine-tipped tweezers.
Or something like that.
About a month ago, Jason had the misfortune of waking me up in the middle of the night. All who have done this know it is dangerous and unwise. I curse (I don’t just mean I say bad words: I utter curses proven to bring about cases of the pox, boils, and my favorite, leaky bowels), I cry, I scream, I throw things. I do not like being woken up. But he had no choice: he had a tick on his shoulder, and having grown up on a farm where tick removal was a part of everyday life, I’m the designated tick-puller in our house. It’s a job title I’ve never aspired to, but it turns out when you develop a pattern of cursing people with leaky bowels, karma tends to throw it right back at you by making you the tick wrangler of the house. So there I was at three a.m., pulling a tick off my husband. I was not amused.
Full disclosure: though I hate the darn things, I’m kind of proud of my tick-removing abilities. I can usually get them out quickly, getting head, pincers, and a bit of flesh in one tweezered tug. Maybe two. This was a two-tugger, then we burned the little parasitic demon, and I went back to bed. I was not yet worried about the predicted Tickageddon. Ticks happen, right?
Except they keep happening. They’re all over, and we’re finding them in the house—hanging on the front door, knocking with their nasty pint-size pincers, or on the shower curtain. I found one on Pugsley last night, and both he and his sister are indoor cats. We’re bringing them in on our clothes—and it’s been too rainy to work in the yard the past two weeks, so they must be hitching a ride on our socks and pants when we’re walking from our cars to the door. Either that, or we’ve got mice in our house that are bringing them in (in which case, Pugsley is to blame for his own tick: it wouldn’t have happened if he did his job and acted like a cat).
I have to work for a living. I can’t be spending every day yanking out ticks. I asked Jason to look into a tick lawn treatment service. He did, and quoted me a price. Apparently, the explosive tick population has also caused an explosion in lawn service treatment costs.
You know, I’ve always liked guinea hens.
In some cultures, the tick is known as "the bug sent straight from Satan." (And if that isn't quite true, it should be.)
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