Friday, October 8, 2010

Miscellaneous: Fleas!

The little blood sucking creatures love me. I hate fleas. I despise flea bites. Lucky for me (unlucky...unhappily for my family) we don't have pets. But every so often someone introduces me to their flea circus, and I get eaten alive.

You think I exaggerate. By eaten alive I mean they leave half egg sized welts on my body. They itch so intensely it burns. When I was in my teens I received over 300 bites (I counted!) on my body because my best friend had cats. Of course the fleas didn't bother them, just me.

I know a lot about the little suckers (heh). They generally fill up on three draining bites. If they don't get their fill, then they keep going. They have hard little shell bodies. You have to catch them, roll them in your fingers (to knock them out), crush them with the back of your thumbnail on a hard surface, and do a little dance to celebrate their death. Okay, that last part was just me.

I've been bitten 14 times in the last 7 days. It sucks!

3 comments:

Oh to Be a Muse said...

so sorry to hear this! how do you get rid of them?

http://ohtobeamuse.com

PurpleNepenthe said...

I have to make sure they don't have time to reproduce, which means leaving myself out there as bait. Vacuuming and spraying are my other usual tactics though I have thought about wearing flea collars on my ankles. ;)

jo said...

I have this problem too...thankfully in our colder climate the fleas die off and are rarely much of a problem for our mostly indoor dogs/cat...knocking on a pile of wood here, but since moving to MT I've not had a single bite, unlike my childhood and previous life in CA. Again, I'm thinking it's the sub 0 temps! I'll try not to complain too much about them this winter! ;-)