flea!

Yep, that's one of those damn blood suckers. Renee's revenge on my neglecting her feelings, no doubt. We guys just have it so tough! LOL

This here is a picture of my ankle and while it's not very obvious, I guess, there's a bunch of flea bites on there. Itches a bit, dammit.

The annoying part is that the damn fleas can't use my blood--fleas are mostly species specific and don't have the proper enzymes to make meals out of blood from other critters--so they're not getting anything out of biting me. It's just frustration and starvation driving their biting.

Well, I guess the real annoying part is the bites themselves, but I wanted to seem a little sensitive there for a moment. But no more of that. Kill the fleas!
While most of the bites are on my ankles and calves, there's an occasional bite up higher like these 4 on my thigh.

They're kinda hard to see through the hair but I wasn't able to focus on the skin with all the hair in the way. Sorry.

Most of the fleas are history now but a few still linger despite my spraying the bedroom and living room 4 times and the worst places 6 times. I think that they'll all be gone in a few days though and plan to sleep in my bed again Wednesday night. Tonight will be on the couch again tho--I hate the idea of getting bites any further up my bod--if you know what I mean.
Here's a picture to give you a better idea of the size of the demonic little buggers. That's the tip of my finger and above it is a flea. I just took the picture about an hour ago so this flea is quite the survivor.

The picture is taken on a wall in my living room near a lamp so I was able to take it without using a flash. That close up, a flash is nearly useless anyway.

Comments

Michelle said…
Now that you've gone all Greek, will you be serving up baklava? :o)
1:41 AM
Anonymous said…
Fleas! Eww! Forget about doing your own list of 150 things, you've shown thigh!

Fleas can be persistent. Good luck getting rid of them.
10:27 AM
Lois Lane said…
I know you are blaming the animals for the fleas but from where I sit, you are equally hairy. :P I bet those poor kitty cats are cussing you out good!
Lois Lane
4:55 PM
Anonymous said…
Yikes fleas just aren't kind are they?! Hope they stop biting!
5:28 PM
utenzi said…
I never quite thought of it like that, Lois. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion. :-p
5:39 PM
kenju said…
Why was the flea on a wall and not on an animal or person???
7:52 PM
utenzi said…
I suspect the flea was confused, Judy. Maybe it was like in those old Raid commercials where the bugs were getting "high" after inhaling pesticides.
12:17 AM
OldLady Of The Hills said…
Long Time No Read! I'm here from Michele tonight Utenzi...
Between the Poisen Ivy and now the Fle prblem, your poor body has been attacked and attacked again! You must be one choice guy, my dear! (lol)
1:10 AM
Unique Designs from Zazzle said…
no kidding, you're the Job of the nature world
8:47 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nitroflex at home

Image
I mentioned a few days ago that I'd purchased off of Craig's List an exercise machine. A Nitroflex, to be more specific, for the grand sum of $75. The boxes you see to the left were bought by the seller as discontinued merchandise over a year ago and stored in his back yard storage shed. You might be able to see some of the bugs and such that had made their homes on these boxes. I left them out on my deck for a few days before opening them to allow the insects to leave gracefully or die in the sun. The picture to the left is the pieces from the box, unboxed, and up in one of my upstairs bedrooms. For the most part it wasn't difficult to move it around though two pieces were heavy and a number of them were kinda long and bulky to be wandering about the house with. Surprisingly, this kit didn't require any extra tools. There were two allen keys and one combo wrench included in the boxes and that was all it took to put it together. The whole thing only took about half an h...
Read more

dogs and cancer

Image
Like the old commercials for Fruit Loops, a Kelloggs' breakfast cereal , would say: "A nose, it always knows". While that commercial was referring to Toucan Sam, I'm just using this as a lead in to talk about how sensitive dog noses are and how they can be used, perhaps, to detect cancer. There have been a number of mentions of this in the media recently. Here's two items from CBC news this year. One story that ran on 60 Minutes and another from the Early Show . Both of these stories refer to a study run by Dr. Bob Gordon of the Scripts Clinic in La Jolla which used urine samples of cancer patients and healthy people to determine how well dogs could detect differences in odor between the two. That study resulted in the conclusion that a trained dog could detect cancer to a degree that was 3 times greater than could be accounted for by mere chance. Pretty good but not great. A much more interesting study has been just released: In the small world of people who tra...
Read more

ankle update

S ince a few people object to seeing my feet --poor misdirected souls--I have the two pictures below hidden behind links. Behold them at your own risk! *evil laugh* Actually they're not scary though the first one is a little colorful. T he first picture shows my ankle and foot from the side, as labeled. You can see a lot of general edema of the entire foot. There's also a good bit of discoloration of the ankle area and to a lesser degree the top of the foot all the way down to the toes. The side view is a lot worse in this regard than the top view. T he second picture shows the two feet from the top so you can compare the somewhat normal looking right foot to the injured left foot. There's not much abnormal color on this view but you can see the "sausage like" swelling of the left foot. It's this swelling that is causing my main problem--I can't get the foot into my boots and I need the boots to support the ankle. Damn Catch-22. Side view, looking inward ...
Read more