Monday 30 September 2013

I want Spring back!


$260 that I will never see again!! My but aren’t the little beggars expensive these days!

It seems that summer has bullied springtime right out of existence this year and with the heat and the humidity and the unfulfilled promises of rain, has come an avalanche of ticks and other nasties which have never worried us before.
 

The ‘dog park’ folk are all full of tick related news and as I witnessed one ‘mummy’ de-tick her beloved this week, I thought it prudent to get some tick repellent sharpish. The other normal pills that Dibley gets don’t cover tick protection and so after wading through the research to see what is compatible with her chemical lot, I walked out of the pet store $230 poorer!! But as the story in the park goes, the local vet has made $30000 in the last little while treating dogs for tick related illnesses, not that I am thinking for a minute they are pleased about that! It seems a small price to pay for that sort of insurance and anyway I am a lazy cow and so will no longer have go over dog looking for lumps and bumps. Yeah, Dibley is sorted.
Every morning I go out to the pond and feed ‘the girls’. I call ‘em over and they swim, on masse to greet me. I do love watching them! But over the past few days the pond has turned from crystal to green sludge and now it is not easy to see the girls coming. The lack of visibility is bad enough but the stink is the real kicker!! What a pongy pond I have!! I have tried scooping out the green bits leaving the filter, ( the pump thing for the Wise Old Woman Fountain) on all day. This only results in the filter getting all clogged with green shit and that really is stinky to clean – oooh yuk all under my nails!!

So I got some stuff from the pet shop that might just help the slime. Seems the girls don’t care about the sludge, so I guess in reality the stuff is more for me than them. I reckon it is quite the job to clean it out so that will see us busy tomorrow.

The best news though is that the cure for the other truly shitful pests of the season is free of charge. Steve’s size 42s or my thong ( read flip flop you poms!) just need to be at hand. The early summer has seen a stampede of bloody spiders into the house. Some of them as big as your hand! This is no joke! What I always called old garden type spiders, turn out to be Huntsmans. Pretty harmless fellas, I thought, except that one of them lunged right at me, yes it leapt at me a number of times and I had to retreat across the room to escape it. The only thing that stopped it was a well aimed size 42. Flattened and splattered. I googled about them and found that yes indeed female huntsman spiders are aggressive and do bite! I can still taste the adrenalin from that particular fight or flight episode. Since then we have had 3 more invasion incidents. Steve managed one with furniture removal and some Mortein and I took a slap at another and the third just wandered into the aircon vent, where in my nightmares it is breeding like a maniac and preparing for a final onslaught.

Whatever happened to springtime – a moment to collect yourself for the intensity of summer, to ease into the prickly heat and the bugs, find some shorts that fit, and actually spend a couple of minutes getting ‘tog ready’. I am not sure about global warming, but I do mourn for the loss of spring.

 

 

 

 

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