Life is good. I have a warm, wet, slimy bouvier beard in my lap. (Bouvier beards are required by Dog’s Law to be gross. The Dutch nickname for the breed means, “dirty beard.”)
Now I have to worry about all the ticks he’s probably brought into the bed with him.
This May has been terrible for ticks. Appropriately icky for Lyme disease awareness month. Betsy, all my PCAs, and I have all found them on ourselves at least once, most of us have had one attached, though briefly.
I will soon put up my post on how to tick-check your dog. Meanwhile, please remember to tick-check yourselves. Very important.
Back to my amazing week. The response to my questions about Twitter and Facebook have wowed me. Thank you! I’m now tweeting with several of you! Very cool. I’m still learning how to say everything in 140 characters or less. (You may have noticed, brevity is not my long suit. No pun intended.)
I’m slooooowly starting to build a FB fan page. I will let you know when it’s up.
The auction is almost over. It ends in less than three hours! Some exciting bids have come in this evening (while I was taking a nap, mostly!)
Thank you so much to everyone who has supported it!
Note: If you really want the thing(s) you bid on (including my stuff), please check the site, because some of you have been outbid and may need to snipe! (That’s a term I learned from Betsy, who sells on eBay. She tries to do it when she buys, but we have a slow internet connection, so it’s tricky.)
I’m extending the deadline for a couple of days for you to get your comments in at my other blog post. Because . . .
I would like to be able to thank you with an e-click or tweet-click from me (I have it as a wav file now, too!), and/or a thank you postcard (Sick Humor Postcards or Barnum card) from me in the mail, and/or if you’re interested in the After Gadget Jackpot, please go to yesterday’s blog about it and comment.
Random tangent: Postcard postage has gone up to 29 cents. I didn’t this, and have been part of a creative-postcard-sending circle, and we were all doing 28 cents of postage. Oy!
I know several of you have bid who haven’t commented yet. But I don’t know everyone’s other handles and names and e-addies, so it’s too confusing for me to try to put in your names, myself. (And if Barnum chooses you, and you don’t want the book or whatever, that’s fine! I won’t force it on anyone!)
Betsy has agreed to be judge when I have Barnum pick out the winner. (I plan to video or photograph the event.) She has pointed out that I either will need to put the pieces of paper face down, so Barnum can’t read them, or to have a serious talk with him about ethics, so he doesn’t choose someone intentionally. After all, if Dumbledore’s Goblet of Fire can be hoodwinked, you never really know if you have an impartial judge (lying across your feet in your bed, snoring).
Can you tell I’m a bit giddy by now?
I have experienced wonderful sisterhood this week working with the other women to help our friend.
I have been totally blown out of the water by you folks.
The whole experience has given me new hope — in making and keeping friendships, in maybe being able to work more, in learning I can do things I didn’t realize I knew how to do. I thought I was just going to volunteer a few hours to get things going. Just shows to go ya.
I tried to make our group of Feisty Sisters an Apology-Free Zone, because there were always comments like, “I’m sorry my typing is so bad, I’m having seizures,” and “I’m sorry I wasn’t around yesterday, I was only awake for four hours,” and “I’m sorry I couldn’t do my shift earlier, I was in the ER today.”
I guess that’s my “Lyme disease and MCS awareness month” note for this post. The above dialogue is a pretty good indication of what it’s like to be in a group of women with Lyme and MCS. We’re really sick, and we’re so used to it, and to people “not getting it” (and because we’re women), we think we have to apologize for ourselves all the time.
When I would remind the gals not to apologize,they would apologize for apologizing! People would “like” me saying, “Don’t apologize,” and they would apologize themselves, the next time. Somebody else would “like” me telling them not to apologize, too. Good times.
Okay, snipe away. I’ll see you on the other side.
-Sharon, the muse of Gadget, and Barnum, SDiT?
P.S. Don’t worry. Barnum still knows what a clicker sounds like. We’ve been doing a fair amount of clicking-from-bed all week.
After Gadget 
: ) Such a joy to work with you on the auction.
Aww, thank you! Right back at you!
Really looking forward to your post on how to check for ticks. We don’t have deer where I live, just moose and other wildlife, but I still want to know h ow to do it myself so I don’t have to ask Huib for help. he’s a bit more laid back about things than I am so I’d like to do it alone so he isn’t wondering why I’m worrying. Better to be safe, especially when we do visit places where lyme has been reported.
Actually, mice and other small rodents are the main carriers of Lyme to people. The name “deer tick” is misleading. Mature ticks feed on deer, but then when their larvae need to eat, they’re tiny and seek out small animals. They feed on the rodents and pick up all the nasty diseases. Then they fall off and become nymphs. Estimates are that 50-80% of people with Lyme get it from nymphs, which is the juvenile form of the tick, and smaller than the adult.
Mice, voles, etc., live in leaf litter near houses (sometimes in houses — basements, walls, etc.). So, if you have mice, voles, moles, etc., anywhere near where you live or where you go, you and your dogs have ample opportunities for exposure to Lyme and other tick-borne diseases.