I painted my arms...

...with clear nail polish last night on the advice of a friend. He said that it would smother the chiggers and kill them. Well, I'll try anything once. I fell asleep waiting for the nail polish to dry...now part of my arm is glued to my jammies.

For some reason I thought that the polish would peel off when it dried but it won't so I guess I'll have to get the nail polish remover and use that next.

Let's see...so far I have filed my arms with a pumice stone, applied nail polish and next I have to use the remover to get it off. Basically I gave myself an arm-icure.

I've seen so many things down South that I've never seen up North and chiggers are only one of them. I've also seen giant oil drums used as house furnaces, an amazing number of NASCAR fans and one recruiting billboard for the KKK.

And now chiggers. What the hell else is out there that I haven't seen yet? From lizards to possums, I thought I'd seen it all. Of course you can't actually SEE chiggers, which is why I got bit so many times. You'd be amazed at how much harm something that you can't see will do.

Check this out...it's what happened when I simply scratched my arm. It was a scratch done without thinking, not a "DAMN this itches!" scratch. But still, I lost a lot of blood:







Amazing, isn't it? If you saw the tiny sore that the blood came from, you would think that I was a hemophiliac.

Anyway, enough of chigger bites. I'm itching just thinking about it. People have sent me a few old wives tale type of cures and I'm doing them all. Well, all except the one that involves gasoline. I'm not lucky enough to walk around full of gas thinking that I won't combust. If the bugs were something that I could SEE, I might feel differently, depending on what they looked like.

Have you guys ever seen a hellgrammite? It's the larvae of the dobson fly. My great aunt Mamie and I were fishing one day and she mentioned what good bait the hellgrammites were. We didn't have any, we were fishing with night crawlers and minnows.

Shortly after that my boyfriend took me to spend the weekend at his cabin on Smith Mountain Lake in ol' Virginny. We always fished there so we stopped for bait on the way up. Usually, you see the bait when the clerk gets it for you but when we asked for the hellgrammites, the clerk went into another room to get them. She packaged them like she did the other bait we bought, in a white Styrofoam cup with a lid. We never saw what was inside that sucker until later.

My boyfriend at the time, Robert, was not a wimp. Not in any sense of the word. He was a carpenter who owned a contracting business. He was a good old Roanoke boy from the pickup truck to the jeans and plaid flannel shirts, he was certainly what you would call a "man's man".

So after we got there and unpacked, we went out to the dock and started fishing right there. After a while when I hadn't caught anything with the night crawlers, I asked Robert to get me one of the hellgrammites. He reached for the Styrofoam cup, opened it, looked inside and screamed like a girl.

Without thinking, he whipped the cup away from him and toward me. Those hideous little creatures were everywhere. Then I screamed. We were both running around screaming on top of that mountain...not a soul in site but you'd think that we were being chased by Charlie Manson, Tex Watson and the nutty chicks who followed them.

Eventually he kicked them all into the water and we continued to fish...with night crawlers. The water was seeded with those critters. I never did get to find out if they were good bait. I don't remember catching much that day except for a mutant large carp that broke the line before I got it all the way out of the water. All I saw was the head and THAT was at least a foot long itself.

Aunt Mamie passed away years ago so I'll never know if she meant that as a joke or if she seriously used those nasty things. Knowing her, it was probably a joke.

Here is a picture of one of them but it doesn't do justice to the frightening nature of those things. They're huge and this picture doesn't show you that:

Now...if I were covered with those, I would soak myself in gasoline...and then I'd light myself on fire.

BTW, here is a beautiful example of Chicago architecture:

http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/illinois/chicago/library/newlibrary.html