Stop Bugging Me!

Friends. Neighbors. Family. Pets. I think Jay has suggested me into an imaginary infestation, so I'm going to have to initiate an imaginary quarantine until I can find the imaginary culprit.

There were two situations in the past that led to this gullibility.

One - several years ago, we had a problem with clover mites. They are these teeny, teeny, TEENY little red bugs about the size of half a grain of sand. They don't do anything, they don't eat anything, they don't bite, but they are so small that when you finally notice them, you also notice there are MILLIONS of them. They were in our bathroom and when I finally realized I wasn't hallucinating and the little dirt specks WERE really moving, from there it was a constant psychological freakout as I started to assume they were everywhere. I would sit and stare at every tiny freckle on my arm, convinced they were Trojan horses for these little armies to invade me personally just like they had invaded me bathroomly. We eventually sold that house (technically NOT because of the mite madness, but I won't say it wasn't a factor for me) and that was that.

Two - When we lived in a horrible apartment before we moved here, we had fleas. ALL our pets had fleas. They were everywhere. I made daily and nightly blanket checks on our beds, and every tiny itch or tickle would send me into a flea-finding frenzy. We did bug bombs, we tried every single medicine, we dumped some kind of livestock powder all over, we bathed them, we brushed them. I picked little fleas out of their fur and flushed them so much I'm sure our city experienced a water shortage just from our house. It literally took over a YEAR to get rid of them and to this day I still start searching if I see any little black piece of dirt on ANY of the animals. 

So you can see, I don't like bugs en masse. If there are one or two, no biggie. That's just fun for the cats. (Unless it's a bee or a spider - that's never funny. If you don't kill them the first time, they come back with their friends for revenge.)

Jay told me that our neighbor mentioned they've already found a tick on their little dog this year and that it's probably going to be a bad year for them. We live on a pond and have all the pond scraggly plants and grass at the edge of our yard, so it's easy for them to hitch a ride on our dogs. I have already given our dogs their flea/tick medicine, but now that he has mentioned it to me no less than three times, I'm starting to move away from the normal watchful waiting attitude to the crazy I think they're everywhere madness. I'm like a crack addict, scratching and checking all over to make sure there's nothing on me anywhere. I have new headphones for work and my hair keeps getting squished right up against my ear, and each time it tickles my ear, I'm paralyzed with the horror that maybe there's a bug in my ear. I know I would go stark raving lunatic mad if that happened. I've shoved about 20 Q-tips in there in the last few days (and seriously, WHO believes you can't use a Q-tip in your ear? Even Q-tip has written on their package "not for use in ear canals." Really, Q-tip? Really?). I'm so bugged by these imaginary bugs right now that I think I may have finally found my ticket to disability - Pseudobugophobia (n) - The unavoidable inability to perform any normal work related tasks due to the absolute imagined conviction of imaginary pest infestation.