Lovely. I have Lyme disease.
I’ve missed a couple posts, but I’ve got excuses. And Lyme disease.
It’s been an epic week, getting pigs, and bees, cut off from posting images, and exposed to poison ivy, plus some community group stuff I’m involved in.
Saturday a bite by my knee that had been unusually itchy and inflamed since I was bitten a week earlier hinted at forming a “sun dog” in the morning, and by afternoon was the unmistakable bull’s eye rash.
I’m lucky; it’s a 50-50 chance that Lyme manifests in the unambiguous target rash. It was really a matter of time; with the degree of exposure to ticks I have around here, Lyme was statistically practically an inevitability. But all’s well – I’ve started the antibiotics and had a pint of Ben and Jerry’s (Chocolate Therapy). I feel normal. It’s all about catching it early, before the headaches, and fever, …. and nervous system destruction, set in.
This tick, if it even was a tick (I suspect a spider), was definitely not on me for 24 hours, like “they say”. It wasn’t on me for eight. I woke up with the bite in the morning, and if it wasn’t a spider – the usual bite-in-the-night culprits – then I scratched the tick off in my sleep and never saw it again.
—–
In other news, I’m down to one guinea. I was hoping that the disappearance of the second last (a hen), meant she had gone to sit on eggs. But I found her body tonight:( One left standing. And I had them down to four peaceful, quiet guineas. Why are they dropping like flies?
The pigs are still with us, and after sleeping almost the entirety of their first day here, prefer to root over eating their food, and loooove the hay. They bury themselves in it in all kinds of ways.
The old chicks are all feathered in, the size and approximate capability of sparrows, and have liberated themselves from the chickery. Then their mom was getting too much abuse from the loose roosters, so I put the family into the controlled environment of Silkieland, and they mostly stay in there but come and go under the fence too.
The new chicks are peppy and cute, two Ameracaunas and two little Oreos again. Little tuxedos. I hope they are Cleopatra’s (Oreo hen as an adult), but one is much smaller than the others, and I suspect it’s a Silkie cross. I can’t imagine Cleopatra letting that happen (?!), but I’ve never seen a chicken runt either. We shall see.