Food for bugs

I seem to have relegated Sunday afternoons to working in my yards. I often intend to work on other nights as well, and I seem to be able to get about an hour’s worth done on Mondays, but other things (like sleeping, or sitting still, watching TV and eating too much) seem to come up and distract me instead. Compared to what it looked like before I got to it, my yards look great. I still have a lot of work to do, but I certainly don’t mind working glacially on it. I can see results every time I go out there, and that feels good. To be able to go out and lose myself in just trying to get my yard into some sort of shape so much that when I stop for water and glance at a clock, hours have passed, and before I’m ready to stop, the sun sets and forces me back inside. To see yet another pile of branches I have trimmed from a neighbor’s overgrowth, six feet square and just as tall in the middle, and know that I cut all those branches myself with only a small pair of shears (and a ginsu knife for that one, big branch). There is a sense of accomplishment.

So, there are a lot of bugs in my yard, and in the air around my house, and I have been taking steps to reduce their numbers, and to prevent them from feasting on my flesh and blood. I take garlic oil supplements twice a day, to discourage mosquitos from getting me. One day I didn’t, and that night I had bites up and down both legs, across my back and arms, and even one on my face. Generally though, the garlic is effective. The poison I have been putting in my yard may or not be reducing the number of bugs living around and under my house, but it isn’t touching the bugs that live under the masses of rotting leaves I am slowly working on removing. So, when I work on or around these dessicated piles of old leaves and dead branches, not even the unpleasantness of my garlic’y self prevents the angered insects from trying to anger me.

This morning I have some very angry, itchy swellings all over both of my calves. I was wearing shorts to work in the yard last night, and I don’t seem to be eaten anywhere but between the tops of the socks I was wearing and the bottom of the shorts. Not just a few, and not small. Dozens and dozens of them, in clusters and constellations, screaming out to me to scratch. I suppose I should look into some way of dealing with this. To calm my screaming, burning nerves, and to prevent this awfulness in the future. I suppose taking away their homes by clearing away the leaves and trimming the trees, then poisoning the ground with Diazanine granules should be a few good steps. In the meantime, I am content to suffer.

(Does that make sense? Can I be content and sufferring at the same time? Is it really sufferring at that point, or just an annoyance?)

Also, I don’t know how to tell the difference between bug bites and hives. It occurs to me that theoretically, I could just be having a sever allergic reaction to something I was walking through yesterday. Then again, would I have hives on my hands and arms as well, which were picking up and reaching through all the same things as my legs? There isn’t a single mark on my arms. Crazy bugs.