Rick's b.log - entry 2025/06/26

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Refreshing

It is still hot. A bit of an agricultural catastrophe - the wheat (or barley? I've not looked closely) was nice and green at the start of last week. By Friday it was completely brown and, as you might imagine, not particularly plump. The sunflowers have started to head, they don't even come up to my waist yet. The maize is looking sad and dry. And since we're on a level 1 drought warning, the farmers can't irrigate the crops. I don't really understand why there is a drought warning on the bit of France, a country surrounded by half it's six sides by water, that pokes out into the ocean. I can't help but feel that the main problem isn't the consumption of water but general neglect and lack of investment. Is water privatised in France? Is it being used to make shareholder profits and bumper pay rises for managing directors instead of, you know, supplying water? That's what has gone so very wrong in the UK...an island.

It is currently raining, just a touch, not enough to change anything. It's a little over 31°C and it feels like a thunderstorm is on the way. Of course, the ground has been baked and the grass is brown too, so a short blast of rain will do next to nothing except cause localised flooding.

Yup, as I write this, the sky just grumbled like my stomach after some of that poison pepper. I can't even say it would be nice to stand out and get rained on, because the temperature is still thirty-odd.

So to keep myself cool, I took some of that nice lemon/lime drink that I found (water, 12.5% lemon juice, 12.5% lime juice, sugar, not made from concentrate) and popped it into the freezer compartment of the fridge. When it started to freeze up around the edges, I gave it a good shake to make it a runny slushy...slushie? You know what I mean. ☺

I am going to refrain from saying how much I like this drink because me liking something is usually the kiss of death. It comes from Brazil so I'll probably never see it again. It is also a rather particular taste (given that, well, it's lemon and lime) so I wonder if it would be popular? Hopefully the insane heat might convince some people to give it a try, but I guess I'll have to see.

I'll give an example. At a supermarket at the end of winter I got some alsa cake mixes. One of them was for a "fondant caramel" which is a sort of sad looking barely-risen gummy-in-the-middle caramel cake. It's supposed to be like that. You can easily get mixes for chocolate fondant, but I'm not a big lover of chocolate cake. The caramel fondant? Superb. Absolutely brilliant. Easy to make, easy to freeze, delicious...and of course I've gone to multiple supermarkets since then and haven't seen it since. It isn't even listed on Amazon for some shocking price. I can only guess that maybe alsa was testing the waters with a new flavour and sales didn't make the algorithm happy so it got cancelled after season one.

Dying slowly and in great pain

Well, it didn't look like a flea. Fleas have oval bodies and legs that dangle towards the back, sort of like a jellyfish. This was almost a spider, but with some serious heavy-duty beetle legs.

I'm not sure if that's six legs and two sort-of antenna things, or if it's eight legs. I crushed it a bit between my fingers (no blood came out), it was tough, it took a bit of force.
I think it is a tick, and depending on the developmental stage, ticks can fit both descriptions (six legged nymph, eight legged adult).
If it is a tick, it hasn't been feeding on me. Those things swell up to look like a piece of corn (maize) when full. Well, the adults. I'm not sure about the nymphs.

I'm not sure how, as the grass is cut, most of it is actually kind of dead looking, and I haven't been out much because of the heat. How and why did it find me indoors to stab itself into my leg inside like that?

I checked the wound carefully with a mirror and my phone's camera. It's a small red lump that is the sign of unhappiness due to something inserting itself in an unwanted manner. I have also been to the local pharmacy for the woman there to take a look and she said the wound appears clean (as in no bug bits left behind).

So now it is a waiting game. Lyme disease infections are fairly rare (I think it's something like 4% of bites progress to illness; and they need to have been attached for at least a day) but the symptom list is straight-up nightmare fuel. I need to watch to see if the wound suddenly starts getting a lot larger, or if there are similar 'wounds' (without the central bite) that turn up elsewhere, if I start with flu-like symptoms, if there is facial paralysis, or irregular heart beat (including the possibility of no heart beat!). If I experience any of that, starting as of Saturday (after three days) to the end of July(ish), then I need to go straight to the doctor and let her know what's been going on and likely start a course of heavy duty antibiotics and hope that it'll deal with the infection (it is a bacteria)...unless it's the heart-stoppy one in which case I'll go straight to the beardy bloke in the clouds and punch him right in the ballsack.
Oh, and there's a "long Lyme", a bit like long Covid, where you'll get various symptoms and after the treatment...they'll still be there for an indefinite period, a mechanism that is not understood but "sucks to be you".

Unfortunately I cannot tell if there is a bug walking on me because one of the weird side effects of my form of neurodivergency is that I feel like bugs are walking on me frequently. Just the other week I stared good and hard at my left arm. Close my eyes, there's totally some sort of mid-sized (like pound/euro coin size) spider doing intricate ballet across my arm. Open my eyes, nothing. Nothing at all. So if I talk about fleas and bed bugs and things that will bite you in the night, you might start to itch and maybe even feel like there is something crawling around in your pants (panties/knickers/underpants if you're American) just at that tight bit where the elastic is on the right hand side... Well, I get that sort of thing a lot. There aren't bugs crawling all over me, unless this shitshow called reality is really a simulation and part of the bug-infested actual reality is seeping through.

All of this is, of course, exactly what I had planned for a boring Wednesday at the end of June.

The really crappy thing, other than "you might die", is that in my younger days I've walked through tall grass, walked up and down fields, walked through wheat and dragged my hands across the tops, and beaten the crap out of tall weeds and I've never - not once - given any concern to ticks. As far as I know I haven't ever been bitten by one.
Yesterday? In my own flamin' living room having come home from work, thought "too hot" and plopped down in the rocking chair.
What's with that!?

There are, however, two little inconsistencies that bring doubt into the equation.
There first is the fact that people don't tend to know that they have been bitten by a tick until afterwards. This is because ticks carry a natural anæsthetic to deaden the wound. They need to cling on for a period of time (something in the order of two to five days) to suck a good amount of blood, after which time they'll drop off and then (without their pain suppression mojo) you'll start to notice the bite wound. This, on the other hand, was an immediate sharp pain like being stabbed with a needle.
The second inconsistency is that it requires skill and care to remove a tick. Blindly reaching down, scratching a wound, and being like "oh, there's something actually here" and pulling it with fingers without looking is a total recipe for ending up with the head remaining in the wound. That it came away apparently clean (as confirmed by myself and the pharmacy woman) is kind of astonishing.

But if it's not a tick, what else would it be? And does that, too, have a scary list of "you will die" symptoms? A possible alternative that I considered was a bed bug (again, from where?) but it doesn't look like that to me, and again you don't tend to feel bed bugs until afterwards when the bite itches like hell. Things that specifically bite for blood that aren't dine-and-dash like mosquitoes, don't tend to benefit from a painful bite because that alerts the blood donor that something is there.

For now, the wound is a small red pimple. It throbs just a touch, like it's easy not to notice but if I think about it I'll notice it. Unless I touch it, in which case it's quite a bit more painful, but that's normal - one doesn't poke wounds unless one enjoys pain. Clothing didn't seem to bother it, thankfully, so I did my work without any particular side effect other than "I'm damned tired". It does not itch, not in the slightest. I've had no desire to touch the bite at all today. So that ought to rule out bed bugs and fleas. The bite pain itself may rule out ticks. The thing doesn't have wings. And there is no classic two-bite pairing which therefore rules out spiders. So...?

As a side quest, I think I must have slept in a horrible position on Saturday night (the heat wave) because my back was absolutely killing me. I literally could not sleep. Through the week, I've been able to get some sleep by taking a paracetamol to dull the pain. Now the left side is mostly okay, but the right side hasn't improved. Lying on my right is still painful, and guess which side I usually lie on? A paracetamol eventually lets me get to sleep until about three-ish at which point the pain is quite a lot. I don't bother with another pill because by the time that one does its thing, it's only about an hour until the alarm goes off and I'm thinking about that so don't get back to sleep.

Option one, the comic one. It is a tick. It stuck itself into me, took a sip, and was "oh my god, you're British, bleugh!" and what I felt was my flesh tearing as it yanked it's head out.

Option two, the horror one. It's an unknown type of insect. It just laid its eggs inside me. Soon, my leg will burst open and hundreds of little bugs will crawl out to feast upon my screaming remains until there is nothing left. At which point, nicely fed and willing, they will venture out into the world to do this over and over again until there is nothing left alive but icky black bugs. At which point they'll adapt to feed on each other.

Option three, another horror one. It's a genetically modified bug made by China/Russia/America/Israel/OtherBadGuy that carries a virus based on rabies that turns people into the closest thing possible to a zombie, who will run around like crazed Berserkers biting anything with a pulse, the saliva passing on the virus. This will happen over and over again until there is nothing left alive but armadillos and other creatures that would be damn hard to sink teeth into.

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