Spring ambushed Satomi this week. Keep reading to find out why she needs our sympathy.

1. Here is the most positive part of this post (for Satomi) and it isn’t that positive.  Satomi hates snakes and I always tell her she is too scared.  She worries about them coming into our house and I kind of laugh because when I lived in Japan before there was a five foot long snake who lived under my house and I didn’t mind.  I never had cockroaches or rodents and I chalked that up to the snake.  In return, all it wanted was to sun itself on my sidewalk in peace.  I obliged.  I also gave him a wide berth.  Well, we saw the first snake of spring, smashed flat on the road in front of our house. From the looked of it he was headed right to our flower garden where Satomi spends a lot of her free time. She’s going to have snakes on the brain from now until winter.
2. The cat, Famish, has spring fever and can’t get enough playing time.  Sometimes he gets confused and forgets if he is playing or trying to disembowel some poor animal with his back claws.  If Satomi’s forearm had bowels they would be a shredded mess right now.  Lacking the bowels it is just her skin that took a torrential scratching.  We bandaged her three bloody gashes up and she’s healing but it ain’t a pretty sight. One of the gashes resembles the Panama Canal.
3. The next day we were clearing weeds from under the orange trees.  A mukadae (Japanese Centipede) bit Satomi on the finger.  It probably wasn’t as big as the one in the picture.  I couldn’t tell because she hacked it to bits with her weeding tool. They are fierce looking and fierce behaving creepy crawlies.  In the past I have seen kids put two of them together to fight.  Brutal on many levels. Often, the sting requires a trip to the doctor for medicine.  Fortunately, she was wearing pretty thick rubber gloves and that softened the blow.  Still, they pack some nasty poison and she got a dose.  She immediately started to swell but we found her some steroid cream and a bag of ice so the injury wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  Even with the fast action the pain ran from her finger to her shoulder.  Remember to wear your gloves  when you work outside!  I’m pretty lazy about that but I made a note to change my ways.  Now, the swelling is mostly gone but the area itches beyond belief.
4. Later the same day, when when we got home, Satomi was stung by what she thought was an abu (a horsefly) in our living room.  It was hanging out on our drying laundry and we accidentally gave it a free ride into the house. I’m positive that isn’t what it was.  It was a lethal killing machine.  I’m guessing it was a hornet or wasp of some sort.  Again, Satomi was lucky.  Whatever it was stung her through a piece medicated tape that she had on her arm to relieve her (most likely) stagnating carpal tunnel.  The sting still swelled immediately.  More cream and ice kept the swelling more or less in check but like the mukadae bite it still itches.  Usually, I throw the bugs from our house outside if I can capture them alive. I killed this…eventually.  I didn’t like the idea of an angry stinging creature flying around.  It was harder to kill than a tick and ticks are pretty tough.  It was probably about an inch long but it was like one inch of steel.  In the end he was dying as I threw him in the trash can because he broke in half where two sections of his body came together.  That only happened after about a minute of trying to squish him with the leg of a clean pair of pants and then a wadded up paper towel, I never got his exo skeleton to crack.  Amazing!
5. On top of those things, some random bug bit Satomi on the leg and she didn’t notice at the time.  Now that seemingly innocuous bite that swelled up into a welt, turned red and won’t stop itching. Did I mention that bugs love Satomi.  Mosquito season is just winding up and, apparently, she looks like the desert tray.  It’s gong to be a long six months on that front.