The weather lately has not been to my liking. On pleasant days though, I’ve been out and about, working in my yard or at Ramsey Park.

At home, I have weed-eated with a vengeance, freely stepped in thick vegetative growth and rummaged around bare-handed in my over-grown butterfly garden. The weather is cold, so it’s too cold for snakes was my thinking. Well, that was errant thinking. Our big, beautiful resident Indigo snake is out and about.

Sluggish, perhaps, but still out. So I’ve taken more caution in my gardening ventures. Indigo snakes are our friends; they eat rattle and coral snakes.

(Not all people trying to handle a snake remain as happy as Tony.)

So, the snakes are out, but the ticks aren’t. That’s a good thing. I haven’t been as diligent in de-ticking when I come in from doing yard work. Well, that’s not good thinking, either, I discovered.

The ticks are out, too. A tick had latched onto my hip sometime during the night. Yes, yucky, but it happened. Not many things in nature scare me. Tick bite does.

I’m fortunate that they scare my doctor, too. Two years in a row she has had to prescribe a round of antibiotics as a preventative.

Most ticks don’t carry diseases, and most tick bites don’t cause serious health problems. They don’t rush ticks to a lab for disease testing. But according to my doctor, the medical practitioners have been cautioned about Lyme disease in our area. They have been advised to take tick bites seriously and treat with antibiotics.

Ticks also can carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever and other diseases. The internet has a plethora of information about removing ticks, home remedies for treating an infected bite site, and medical treatment advice.

Ticks apparently don’t hibernate here. Personally, I’m going to go back to my summer de-ticking diligence after working outdoors.