It's confirmed-- I live in Tick Central. I know because I live around the corner from the guy who invented and sells Ticked Off(tm) - World's Simplest Tick Remover(tm). It's the guy with the oxen and the chickens and the big compost piles. I recognized the address from the back of the package.
I have been taking at least three ticks a day off the dog and one every couple of days off myself or Rachel. (And yes, I do use Frontline on the dog.) I got my Ticked Off tick remover when I was at the animal shelter on Monday and I thought I'd be using it on the dog first, but I ended up debuting the tool by removing a small deer tick from my inner elbow Monday night. It hurt because the tick was kind of in there, but it was definitely better than dealing with it with tweezers.
Ticks are disgusting. I thought about trying to take a photo of one since I encounter so many in the course of a day, but they're so nasty that I wouldn't have the patience. If you're not familiar with ticks, you're lucky. This site will tell you a little bit about them.

I'm seriously thinking about giving my Japanese students at UNH this fall a printout of this on the first day of class.
Found the link on OnMyMind, which also has a nice post today expounding on the sublime divineness of ume juice in summer. I concur and I wonder if it will ever get hot enough here to miss it.

One aspect of Japanese culture that has, perhaps unfortunately, established itself as a permanent feature of our family regardless of geographical location is the shoe thing. Yes, I am bound by a unique interpretation of Japanese footwear regulations in my own American home.
The porch functions as a genkan, which makes sense. This is the main footwear change-up area for the transition from house slippers to outside shoes or vice versa. There are no guest slippers because guests are exempt from all the shoe rules, within the bounds of "common sense". I need to go out the back door into the yard with the dog several times a day so there is another little shoe station in front of the sliding glass door, complete with it's own shoe rack. I have a pair of low cut Bean boots that Shiro picked up for $3 at Goodwill that I wear to take the dog out into the yard. Slippers are worn throughout the first floor and up the stairs to the second floor but are removed before entering either of the bedrooms. Those rooms are bare feet or socks only areas.
These rules are, of course, devised by Shiro because I still don't really appreciate the full complexity of the Japanese inside/outside paradigm enough to have done it. It's an inconvenience at times, but nothing worse than that so I comply. Although I'm finding the sanctity of inside cleanliness concept a little ironic now as I sit inhaling the fumes near Shiro's very botched attempt at restoring the staircase by applying several bottles of Citristrip and stripping six decades worth of paint off the stairs to finally realize that it would have been easier just to paint over what was there or else rip out the old boards and replace them with new ones. Guess we just moved up a notch on the home owner's learning curve the hard way.

I don't miss the Japanese Rainy Season. All that humidity and mold sometimes growing inside deep closets and on leather as well. Yuck.
It rains here all the time now too, but they just call it Spring. I got to go play in the spring mud today because Shiro brought me a mountain bike from the Goodwill yesterday. It's got a decent Taiwanese frame, low-end Shimano components, and a comfortable saddle, all for the low, low price of $15. Rachel and I went for a ride after school yesterday and saw a fox run across the road.
It rained hard last night and today is cool and drizzly. The dishes in the sink weren't going anywhere and Shiro won't be back until 2, so I decided to go visit Stef doing her chores at the horse farm down the street. I went down Old Garrison Road, which is actually quite road-like at the far end and all mud and puddles on this end. I put on some waterproof wear and went for it. Got good and dirty and remembered how free it feels to ride downhill on a muddy dirt road, never touching the brakes.

"This air tastes delicious!"
That was the comment Rachel made as we walked to school this morning. It's not the first time I've heard the comment from a Japanese (or in Rachel's case, half Japanese) kid. The first time I heard it was in Amagasaki about a dozen years ago. I was walking from Amagasaki Station to the municipal gym to go workout and ended up chatting with a junior high school girl who was also on her way to work out. She was tiny, even for a Japanese girl, and she told me she was a synchronized swimmer. I'd never seen a girl her age working out at that gym; she told me she was training for a competition.
She asked me where I was from and I told her and she said her sister had been on a homestay around here. "The air there is delicious. I'd like to go someplace where the air is delicious," she said as we walked parallel to the train tracks past paint factories, pachinko parlors and machine shops.

My lawn is a beast. It takes over 2 hours to mow the whole thing, but if I don't, this is what will happen. Today I think I reclaimed a good 10-12 inches of lawn perimeter from the ever encroaching blackberry bushes.
I notice that right after I mow all the birds come and hang out on the lawn. They must get easier access to the bugs they eat in the shorter grass. There's a bird that's been hanging around here that looks kind of like a small crow, except it has a beautiful blue-green head. In fact, it's right outside the window now, picking at the lawn. It's getting to the point where I recognize individual birds in the yard? Wow. That's kind of scary.

I love my dog except for from 3-6pm when he becomes psychotic maniac puppy from hell. He tries to dig his way through the porch wall, nips when I try to put him on the leash to take him out in the yard, attacks my pant legs once I get him out there and barks at everyone for no reason I can deduce. The rest of the time he's a very cool dog. It's just like a colickly baby or a little kid who gets cranky and crazy later on in the day, but you can't put a kid into a crate when he acts like that. That's one more way that having a puppy isn't really like having a baby.

Sunday morning. Pissing down rain. The dog is sleeping and the rest of us are up. Just tried out a new recipe for scones and added some dried cranberries and walnuts too. They could well be the best thing I've ever baked in my life. So nice with a big mug of coffee. I don't think life gets much better than this.
I've got people telling me I should become a baker. I think that would be cool but I like not working better. I always thought I'd go crazy if I didn't have a job to engage me. Turns out I can engage myself pretty well without one.