This is why I hate to be outside in the summer

Yesterday, I tackled the weed ridden flower bed that has been begging for attention for longer than I want to admit. Man, did I have my work cut out for me. There hasn't been very much rain here lately, so the roots were cemented into the dirt. I started in the early afternoon, but the sun was still beating down pretty fiercely on that area of the house. You'd think that as hot and dry as it's been that the weeds would not flourish, but they do. I even had the beginnings of what looked like mini trees growing.

I got about 1/3 of the flower bed weeded until I realized that the sweat rolling off my head and face was probably nourishing the weeds somehow, so I headed inside to cool off.  I am going to be so relieved when it cools off around here and I enjoy being outside again.

After dinner, I headed back out to finish. It seemed much easier once the sun wasn't beating down on me. R came out to keep me company and even offered to help, but I woke up to a cleaned kitchen yesterday morning, so he was off the hook. We pulled out the plants that didn't survive the summer and talked about revamping all the flower beds this fall. It's an exciting life we lead here, isn't it?

When I was almost finished, I grabbed a stubborn weed that was growing up through my azalea, and was wiggling it back and forth to try to get as much of the roots up as possible when a grasshopper/cricket/locust/cicada jumped out of the bush, off my forehead and into my hair.

Yikes!

S was out there with us at this point, and she freaks out enough as it is about bugs and such, so I was trying to calmly remove the squirming, jumpy thing from my hair without making a scene. Did I mention that I was so startled when this happened that I managed to fling dirt into my face and hair as well?

As soon as my finger touched it, it freaked out and kept getting itself more tangled in my hair - which is a miracle in itself since my hair is thinning by the day. So I tried to shake it out, but that got noticed, of course, even though it worked. I tried not to make too big a deal out of it, but couldn't quite shake the feeling that things were crawling my hair. I went upstairs and took a shower, where I promptly got soap in my eye which burned enough that I forgot all about the creepy crawly issues I had when I got in the shower.

This morning, I was rewarded by a stopped up nose, sneezing fits, and an eye that required de-crusting and some antibiotic drops to stay open.

Next time I'm using Round-up.