punch list, sweat, red velvet ant, and blog fix

Well, my dedicated week with Rocky lasted three days but he did have a good excuse. Gunnar's girlfriend went in to have their baby early Thursday morning (Gunnar is Rocky's son) and ended up having to have a C-section, poor thing, and delivered an 8 1/2 pound baby boy, a chunky little thing Rocky says. Rocky did show up yesterday (Saturday) and is back today. We're down to a little caulking, painting touch-up, and some grouting touch-up in the shower, oh, and switching the water pipes around in the attic so I have cold water to the toilet. No pictures though until they are completely finished which should be Monday after Gunnar touches up the paint for the last time. Finished whether all the picky details are attended to or not. Whatever is left I can take care of myself.

Yesterday I got out in the yard and cut back the climbing roses against the fence which were just canes with almost no foliage late morning and then early evening trundled the wheelbarrow full of plant trash to the burn pile, tidied up the burn pile since the last time Marc torched it only the center burned so all the small and large branches had to be moved into one neat pile, filled the wheelbarrow again with the squash and tomato trash and dumped it on the burn pile, plus my almost daily watering morning and evening and by the time I finished I was dripping sweat and by that I mean my hair was soaked, my clothes were soaked and sweat was running off me as if I had just stepped out of a pool.

A couple of weeks ago I was picking that big pile of dead plant material that I had made clearing the clasping leaved coneflowers out of the mini-wildflower meadow and putting it in the wheelbarrow when I unknowingly stepped on one of these...

It's a female red velvet ant, which is really a ground based wingless wasp (the male has wings and does not sting), and they say that the sting is the most painful of all the wasp stings and I'm here to tell you it's the truth. It stung me on the bottom of my left foot (yes I was barefoot) in the middle of the soft part of the arch. Holy fucking cow that hurt but after a couple of hours the pain had subsided and the next day the spot was a little tender but no further pain...for about a week until one evening it was feeling a little tender and I pressed on it and felt a hard lump at the insertion point with a two inch hard line radiating out towards my swollen instep and the whole bottom of my foot was on fire and itching like mad. Over the next week, any stimulation would produce the same result so I soaked it in the hottest water I could stand with epsom salt several times a day and it gradually got better. Today, the hard line has softened considerably as has the lump and the swelling has mostly gone down and while it will still itch a bit if stimulated, it subsides quickly. Will this finally teach me to wear shoes out in the yard? Probably not.

So, here's something totally unrelated. Many of us have noticed that comments on our blogs are no longer sent to our email even though we have it set for that. I learned on another blog that the way to fix that is to go to your settings for email notification and delete your email address, save the new setting, add your email address again and save the setting and it will start sending comments to your inbox again. I did it and it works.