Scratch that one off the list

There are lots of things I hadn't done until I met Neil. You wouldn't believe the movies I haven't seen. I have this thing about watching movies by myself--I hate it. Also, I had never been to the horse races. I'd never waded a creek and fished. I'd also never gotten a tick. Yeah, he never believed me on that but it was true. I got my first tick about a month ago. Something was itching my back so I reached back to scratch it and it was raised up like a pimple. I thought, huh that's weird and went to go check it out in the mirror. I took one look at that black spot and knew...TICK! I ran from the bedroom to the office, screaming all the while. Neil thought it was so funny that he wouldn't take it off for a minute or two. I can still see that nasty little tick in my mind. Gross! Anyway, I digress.

Sunday, Neil and I decided to take the pups up to Clinton to run around on his mom’s land.


Bailey and Scruff in the truck. Scruff hates the car which is why you can't really see her. She's hiding.

We called Annie, Neil’s sister to go with us too. So we get up there and the field is just too hot to be walking around in.


Annie and Scruff

The woods are so much cooler right? What better place to take the dogs than to the creek? I wish I could describe this land to you. It’s wooded, but to get to the creek you have to walk down a very long steep decline.








So we’re just walking along laughing at the dogs and what not and all of the sudden Annie starts itching. Hm that’s weird. Oh look I have a tick on me she says and then just picks it right off and kills it.



Then she realizes….seed ticks…millions of them. This is my first encounter with seed ticks mind you. So I’m like, What’s the big deal? In the meantime, Neil and Annie are freaking out and they’re like Lauren we have to get out of here now. It was like a bomb scare or tornado sirens or something. So we all take off quickly back up the gi-normous hill. And we’re trying to walk fast and what do you know. I swear all of us must have walked into at least one spider web each. Really big webs with the spiders still in them. Aghhhhhh! Neil picks up a big stick and waves it in front of him to clear out the webs and Annie and I try to follow behind. I’m sure we look so hilarious.

We finally get back to the road and can check ourselves out much better. I was the only smart one who wore boots (and I apparently have the worse tasting skin ever because bugs hate me) so I had the least amount of ticks on me. Poor Annie and Neil were getting eaten up. We picked as many off as we could but decided that we needed to wash them off with water. About 300 yards back up the road the creek runs under a bridge on the road, so they decided to walk down while I drove the truck. We gave ourselves a nice hillbilly bath right there in the creek!





Thank goodness I was prepared and wearing my boots. Neil and Annie weren't so smart. They definitely got the worst of it all.



So now I can scratch getting seed ticks off my list too. That was one that I was hoping to keep on there a little longer ;)