ants and others

while nick was here he got some kind of bite on his ankle, he kept mentioning it, I guess it was freaking him out, and it happened, he said, the moment that he stepped out of the van, so it began his less than ideal new orleans experience, and then we had the termites swarming and the bees buzzing and all of that. he kept calling it a spider bite, but when he showed it to me just before he left it looked like an ant bite to me. he said, do they always puff up into zitty things like that and I said, well, yeah. can it be that they don't have fire ants in massachusetts? I don't know, but I, who have had a lifetime of ant bites, am now sporting over fifty (count'em) painfully puffed up zitty things on my right leg, and a few scattered elsewhere, as a result of an anthill mishap at the fireworks last night. yeah it really hurts and it's hideous, too.
hope you're feeling better, nick...

today is a kid-free day and I am going to watch panic room, gods & monsters, and il postino. last night I couldn't stay awake during the second half of talk to her, maybe it was the benadryl, which I'd never taken before, or just leftover exhaustion, but I was unmotivated to watch the rest of it over again this morning because, honestly, I found it unenjoyably disturbing and if anyone would like to explain to me what happened in the end please do.

and we have a tropical storm, which, now that the larder is stocked, thrills me. come on, show me what you've got.