Takes a ticking and keeps on ick-ing

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/06/2020 (2103 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Everyone at my house — this includes two human beings and two small dogs — is doing the best they can to get back to “normal” now that COVID-19 restrictions are being slowly relaxed.

We have been courageously leaving the safety of the couch in our den to head out into the real world in search of the “new normal.” Or the “next normal,” if that is your preferred wording.

For instance, in the last month I have twice visited the stylist who has cut my shaggy hair for more than 25 years, and have made one visit to the dentist’s office to have my teeth and gums poked vigorously with pointy steel instruments.

It felt almost normal, other than all the personal protective gear, including surgical-style smocks, face masks and plastic face shields. And that was just the hairdresser.

So there I was at the salon, perched in a fancy new barber-style chair, with my longtime stylist frowning at me — OK, I assume she was frowning but it’s impossible to be sure, what with the mask — to convey the notion that my unruly hair makes me resemble an escaped circus bear.

Which is when my cellphone made an obnoxious sound to alert me to an incoming text, which turned out to be from my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named.

Despite being largely incomprehensible, this text underscored precisely how normal my life has become, which is to say not normal at all. I will quote my spouse’s text directly: “So come into house, hear noise and your nose trimmer on buzzing away in the bathroom. Go into bedroom to make bed and woodtick on your pillow!”

I will decipher this text for you, beginning with the nose-trimmer reference. Five years ago, my hair stylist ordered me to buy a battery-powered nose-hair trimmer because, and I will quote her directly, “I don’t do noses!”

So she sold me what looked like a high-tech ballpoint pen, but is in fact a device that operates on the same principle as a weed whacker, except you insert it into your nostrils.

I was not proud of the fact that, in the blink of an eye, I had been transformed from a hip, happening guy oozing sex appeal (OK, work with me on this) into the sort of tragic creature who voluntarily agrees to buy a nose-hair trimmer.

But the ugly reality is that I have personally reached that uncomfortable stage in life where the hair on top of your head stops growing, whereas the rogue hairs lurking in your nose and ears begin growing uncontrollably like weasels on steroids.

What I’m trying to say is the other day I was playing around with this trimmer but apparently the batteries were dead so I just left it sitting forlornly on the counter in the bathroom. Which is where my wife discovered it randomly vibrating and lurching around on its own like a large metallic mosquito because, magically, the batteries had come back to life.

My wife was surprised but not overly alarmed to discover our bathroom possessed by the spirit of an evil nose-hair trimmer, but she was extremely upset by the thing she found wandering around on my pillow, namely an icky tick.

If you have been paying attention to the news, you will know that tick season has arrived in Manitoba and we are besieged by a host of these creepy little insects, some of which carry the bacteria that can cause Lyme disease.

The bad news is we have two small dogs, and there is nothing ticks enjoy more than hopping onto dogs and riding them around like hairy buses. The good news is our dogs take that medication that prevents ticks from biting them.

The really bad news is that these pests always wait until they are inside our house before they decide to detach themselves from one of the dogs.

In this case, our toothless dog Juno jumped up on the bed and napped until the tick climbed out of her fur and onto my pillow, which is where my wife found it staggering around. She quickly flushed this intruder to his doom.

A day later, there I was, wearing a pair of gym shorts and a golf shirt, pounding away at a column on the home computer, when, suddenly and without warning, I became aware of that feeling you get when something is slowly crawling up your leg.

Which is when I looked down and —”EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!” — which is the noise a normal human such as myself makes when he realizes that a tick is crawling up his leg and is only inches away from creeping inside the leg of his shorts.

Naturally, I calmly pinched the bug between two fingers and dropped it into the trash. Ha, ha. That’s what I would have done in an alternate universe. In this universe, I screamed like a wounded woodland creature and swatted the bug away with one hand.

What kind of a tick was it? It was the kind with more (bad word) legs than a softball team! What I did next was search the ground until I spotted the little guy, then retrieved a hammer from the kitchen and began whacking the floor over and over with all the intensity a manly middle-aged newspaper columnist can muster, which is not a great deal.

Later, sweating profusely, adrenalin coursing through my body, I used a tissue to scoop up the flattened remains and flushed them into oblivion.

Yes, I could have handled the situation in a more dignified manner without resorting to a brutal hammer attack. But I would like to remind everyone that, at that point, my nose-hair trimmer wasn’t working.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca