Tiny Tuesday : : Dermacentor Variabilis

Otherwise known as a wood tick. It was running around on the back of my neck looking for a good place to latch attach itself when I caught it and put it in a glass of water. That was yesterday. It was still showing signs of life twenty four hours later when I dumped it out of the glass today to take its picture.They have hard shells and are quite resistant to being squished.Like many bugs, they will probably survive the apocalypse because they are so resistant to being killed.

Ticks lurk on the ends of branches and drop when they sense carbon dioxide from an animal or human passing. There are a variety of repellents for dogs. Ozzie takes one once a month in the form of a treat. They don't kill the ticks, which seems to be impossible, they just prevent them from making a hole in the skin and inserting their feeding tubes for a good meal. The tick repellant dog treats cost a fortune, and the fact that there doesn't seem to be any such thing for humans does make me wonder about what's in them, but it is almost impossible to find a tick on a furry black dog. 

OilMan's attempt to clear the drain of his bathroom sink yesterday went awry when he removed the trap and cleared it but then couldn't get it back on. He sent an S.O.S. to David who installed the sink, but David didn't respond. Although it is not a crisis since we have two sinks in our bathroom, OilMan still worried about it all night. This morning as we were driving off for a walk in the Laguna and a coffee at Acre in Sebastopol, he spotted the plumber's truck in front of the house across the street, which is about to go on the market.

Hijacking the plumber, we got the drain fixed, but never got our walk. We probably should have had him fix both drains because he said what every plumber we have ever needed has said, "Whoever did this didn't know what they were doing"....One has to wonder if there is a single competent plumber left, (besides himself, of course).

While we were at it, we also hijacked Pedro, our gardener, who was working over there as well He agreed to take a bunch of junk to the dump, so OilMan spent most of the rest of the day rounding it all up and putting it in a pile, while I cleaned the bathroom, washed a bunch of gross towels and rehung the curtains we took down when we had shades installed. Not exactly the way we had planned to spend the day, but not without its satisfactions either.