Janet, Nancy, Carole, Lynne - colorful celebration stamps

These three did not please me. Janet's is the least boring. That t is clunky.

I think I did Nancy's right after Chuck's - and came close to tossing it.

Then I thought, maybe script will work.

Nope.

Then I thought, maybe huge script in one color will work.

Nope.

When I do a series, I tend to get better. This time they were getting worse. I'll never know if I could have turned things around if I had kept going. I decided to cut my losses and go in a different direction.

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I tried to stay away from off-topic conversation about ticks.

But the NYTimes has a regular column that I enjoy where they tell the story of someone with a hard-to-diagnose ailment. Not that I enjoy reading about ailments, but you never know when you might need to know something.

It was bad enough that ticks could give you Lyme disease - but now there is a variation that is worse,

My skin crawls just thinking about ticks.

OK - here is what you might want to know so that you are careful to look for ticks if you go out into the wilderness.

from the NYTimes:

Only one result was positive — the test for a distant cousin of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme. It’s called Borrelia miyamotoi, and it causes one of the newest tick-borne diseases. The first cases, in Russia, were reported in 2011. Cases were reported in the U.S. two years later. B. miyamotoi, like Lyme, is carried by the black-legged deer tick, but it’s a much easier infection to get. With Lyme, the tick has to be attached to a body for two to three days before the bug can be transmitted. That’s because B. burgdorferi lives deep in the tick’s gut. But B. miyamotoi lives in the tick’s mouth and can invade the body almost immediately.

When untreated, B. miyamotoi can cause recurrent episodes of illness because of an unusual ability to fool the immune system by changing its outer layer. Once it has eluded our disease-fighting antibodies by the equivalent of changing clothes, it can reproduce again and produce a new round of fever, headache, fatigue and body pain that characterize this as well as most other tick-borne infections.

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The thing to note -- there is now the variety that can infect you almost immediately. 

That is enough for this Nanna to say No, thank you - to even the most glamorous of glamping.

And if you are concerned about one person in China dying of bubonic plague - you need to know that people get it right here in the USA -- as long as you go to a doctor who is knows how to look for it, it is easily curable. So far. Who knows, maybe it is working on some sneaky little change.