I May Not Have Made Myself Clear

I don't like the finer points of being outdoors. I don't mind going outside and can appreciate the beauty of nature, but everything that goes along with it, well for lack of a better word - blech.

I hate bugs though they seem to love me. I don't much care for water. I'm not overly keen on trees and flowers can bugger off.

But what I really want to talk about right now is the flower part. For some reason as a pseudo-homeowner I feel it is my right to have a flower garden. A few years back I took it upon myself to scalp a patch of my lawn and convert it into one. I like pansies fine. And pink tulips. And I'm fond of mums.

I hate leafy, bushy flowers. So, naturally I filled my flower garden with the leafiest, bushiest flowering bastards I could find. Some of them I chose like the idiot calla lilies and the pink tulips. Others appeared there like the other lily and the irises.

Of course, the flower bed is partly run by my husband and he likes the stupid bushy, leafy idiot plants. However, when it comes to tending the flower bed it all comes to me.

Fact: no matter how harmless something seems outside of the flower bed once it goes past the stone border it becomes 10-times more terrifying.

In general I love slugs. I like to pet their backs and poke their eye stalks. I am fairly sure they don't mind. Well, that or they absolutely hate it. One can never be too sure with slugs.

However, the instant a slug enters the garden it is a cursed creature who can't be touched, looked at or even admired - perhaps even slightly disgusting to look at and in no way approachable.

Towards the end of summer I get fed up with the overgrown bushy monstrosity in front of my house and grab a pair of kitchen shears (I don't actually own anything to use in the flower bed) and hack everything down. I think there are certain rules and regulations to follow for cutting back plants, but my personal motto is "make it gone." See, gardening turns me into some Larry the Cable Guy kind of crazy person.

Just a few days ago I was happily pulling up mint when I ran into a slug. The horror! But I persevered. I was happily hacking away at the calla lilies and each one of those leaves was filled with dirt and grubs! How friggin' gross.

My taking back of the garden was put on hold until I could come up with gloves. Apparently they don't make gloves that go all the way up the arms. Why? Long sleeves aren't the same. They're not approved or gardening like gardening gloves are. Things can get through the fabric; I'm pretty sure of that.

Why do I insist on keeping up on the garden? I ask myself that all the time. The answer comes in multiple parts. Partially a lot of the plants in the garden come back year after year whether I want them to or not, so I am forced into doing something. If I didn't have the persistent plants I would cave from time to time and dig plots for the mums and pansies and their ilk so I could watch them die.

Perhaps my best bet is to kiss the real flowers good-bye and buy plastic flowers for the flower bed and adhere a fake background to my house kind of like the finer fish tanks have. That way I can enjoy nature the way it was meant to be enjoyed - in a completely artificial way and as always from the safety of my own home.

Good 'Til The last Drop

It has been two days since I ventured outside. In hindsight the funny thing is I went outside to spray bug repellent. My house had been looking a little too welcoming for spiders and I was a tired of walking through their webs to get to the front door.

I really only spent 30 minutes outside. It wasn't long. I laughed. I sprayed bug spray. The little one played in water. Sure I saw one, two mosquitoes biting me. One on my arm and one on my leg. I squashed them and they obediently exploded coating me in my own blood they had so kindly liberated from me.

It has been two days and here I sit covered in no less than 18 bug bites. I suppose I have never been one of the lucky ones. I remember long ago visiting Illinois with a friend of mine. We stopped to see the Mississippi River. At dusk. We were there a short time because we were naturally afraid of sea monsters. I suppose we should've been more worried about the wall of mosquitoes. Luckily for the others the little blood suckers bypassed them and left me with no less than 30 bites on my back alone.

Always looking for a way to dissuade the little bastards from feasting on my blood I will try suggestions. I went to a barbecue once and the cool thing was to use this lotion that worked wonders at keeping mosquitoes away. Well, for everyone else it appeared. After watching everyone else put it on I gave it a shot.

I might as well have slathered myself in gravy and put on a neon sign that read 'all you can eat.' Again I was covered in bug bites while everyone else got off scott free.

Since this is a reoccurring theme in my life I have put some thought into what could cause this. Now, I would like to say that I am not one to go in for conspiracy theories, but since I came up with this one on my own I feel like I don't really have a choice.

The reason mosquitoes are so fond of me is because blood banks have trained them to go after me.

See, I am not keen on donating blood. I have, but I am not happy about it. The first time I donated I screamed when they swabbed me with the alcohol, but I trudged through because I got out of algebra.

Unfortunately, my blood type came back as O+. Since that is a popular type and I am not a willing donor the blood banks have taken matters into their own hands with these trained collection mosquitoes.

So, here I sit fighting the urge to itch and cursing the day the blood banks learned I was O+. Oh, Caladryl! Take me away!

I'm Pining for the Fjords

I suppose it could be considered a type of seasonal depression, and the long, stupid summer months always make it worse.

To put it simply: once again I am done with summer and ready for autumn. To be honest I have been done with summer for about 2 months now.

I have always had a problem with the seasons. There seems to be a bit of a discrepancy in how long they want to last and how long I want them to last. I have always thought that maybe 8 seasons would suit me better.

It wasn't until one of my recent 'I'm ready for fall' rants that I realized how little I cared for summer - and it's not the heat or the humidity. Those are two things that I actually like about the stupid season.

Winter holds the promise of cute snow flakes. Spring brings with it the blossoms. Autumn has the changing of leaves and apples and all the great things associated with fall. And then there's summer.

Summer doesn't actually do anything. It just kind of maintains what spring started and setting up fall. It forces people to run air conditioning and make me cold. Stupid summer.

So here I am, working on putting together a calendar of events and reading about all these wonderful things coming up, in the fall and winter, and I can feel myself choking up and remembering great fall seasons of the past and, generally pining away for the next great season.

Sure, I know that 2 weeks into fall I'll be ready for winter and so the curse continues. That is why I move that we institute an 8 season year and make my life just a little easier.