Yoshi, the cat we got when the summer between 7th and 8th grade, left my parents house last week. She was 18 and did the elephant thing of going off to die alone. What did she leave behind? Fleas. Blood thirsty fleas. Fleas thirsty for my blood, apparently.
I was a veritable buffet for fleas this weekend, despite the spraying, vacuuming of carpets and boiling of blankets. I have bites on the palms of my hands Have you ever had a flea bite ON YOUR PALM? Let alone FIVE bites on your palms… I’m hopped up on benedryl and trying not to itch. I have a wedding next weekend and the last thing I need is to have legs covered in healing bug bites.
When I got home last night, I left my suitcase by the washer and immediately put everything into a very hot cycle. No fleas will be coming into my house. Bastards. I’m far more allergic than anyone in my family, so what was annoying to my parents was emergency level itching for me.
Other than that, it was a fabulous weekend. I got to my hometown around 11PM and watched John Edward Cross Country for a couple hours with my mom. The next day my mom and I went to the ISU Homecoming Parade and I was shocked that I got a little teary eyed watching my high school marching band.
It was sad, too, because the ISU Homecoming parade used to be the largest student organized parade in the country. When I was a kid, the stadium would be full of award winning floats. This year the ONE float won all of the awards, because it was the float. The parade has been replaced by a bar crawl. And crawl is the operative word.
At the end of the crawl, in between the last bar and the stadium, my dad and I sold Mardi Gras beads with shot glasses on the bottom. We sold about 160 necklaces and have a better plan for next year (it’s all about location.) We saw a few people stumble by with black eyes and bloody knees, but they’d survived the pub crawl! Woo hoo! Go Sycamores! No longer the fighting Sycamores, they are a the drinking Sycamores. Sad.