Redartz: Greetings, all! We find ourselves nearing the start of the summer season. Hot weather, hot dogs, cool water balloons, and cooler ice cream; just a tiny sampling of the wealth that Summer has to offer. Of course, as bountiful as summer can be in providing entertainment and recreation, it also has some potential pitfalls. I'm sure all of us have experienced some of these, while pursuing our various warm weather diversions. I surely did (although I don't recall ever being injured while reading a comic under a tree on a sunny afternoon). Here's a couple examples:
Poison Ivy (the plant, not the character)- this nasty stuff is like kryptonite to me. When I was little, I'd love go out into the woods and explore, build forts, play spacemen, army and superheroes; you know the bit. Unfortunately those woods were home to that accursed plant, and many was the time I'd shortly come down with itchy rashes from head to foot. Some times so severely, I'd actually get hives on top of the ivy blisters. It was misery; and I still remember having to soak in those oatmeal baths.
Sunburn- spending so much time outdoors, it was only predictable that the occasional sunburn would result. The worst case: I was a teenager, and was working that summer at my first job (behind the grill at McDonald's). One afternoon I went out to play tennis, and neglected the sunscreen. Later that night I had to work, and about an hour after my shift started, OUCH. I started sweating, and shaking, and got so loopy in that hot kitchen I kept having to go back and sit in the freezer. It was a true summer nightmare..
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Well, there's a couple of those summer hazards. You can (and I hope will) come up with many more, from errant fishhooks to mosquito bites. Ah, but that's summer; you get the bad with the good!
The main one I remember from my childhood is making the mistake of stepping on a tram (streetcar) track on a boiling hot day, with bare feet. Once you've done that once, you make sure to never to do it again.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of mistakes - and trams - I remember five or six years ago, taking a short cut across a field next to some woods, in order to get to the nearest tram stop and instantly being mobbed by a million and one insects of a million and one varieties. I was literally covered by the things by the time I got to the other side of the field. Fortunately, they all abandoned me once I got past the field. I now avoid fields beside woods in the middle of summer.
Yeah, I think the biggest pitfall of nicer weather is the various creepy-crawlies. Since we have pets (a dog and a bunch of cats) that spend a lot of time outside, ticks are always something we have to look out for - even with collars or other treatments, the little blood-sucking b*****ds sometimes fall out of their fur and onto one of us.
ReplyDeleteAnd since we live in a little house on the outskirts of the city with forests and fields nearby, there's all kinds of other insects to deal with, like mosquitoes, and then wasps and hornets that try to make nests on any little niche in our roof.
To be honest there aren't that many hazards in a British summer - it rarely gets hot and biting insects aren't a problem (not in my back garden anyway). Northern Scotland is infamous for swarms of biting midges and, due to climate change, they are apparently spreading to other parts of the UK but they haven't reached me yet. And poison ivy doesn't grow in Britain or Europe - I just googled it and those blisters look awful...you have my sympathy, Red!! As kids the only plant we feared was the stinging nettle (or "stingie" as we called it) - we never touched those but they were easily avoided.
ReplyDeleteSteve and I both experienced the legendary summer of 1976, known as "The Drought" when it didn't rain for three months and the entire country was running out of water, with near-empty reservoirs and government-led campaigns to save water. But nowadays everyone forgets the crisis and just remembers the summer of '76 with fondness because of the long, long spell of hot weather. But that hot weather also gave me a bad case of sunburn!
Ah yes, hot summer days in the country. What could be better than to wade out and take a dip in the cool local stream?
ReplyDeleteAnd come out covered in leeches. Zoinkers!
One hazard of summer is being outside and simply taking more risks. As a child I was forever enduring big scabs on my knees from bike accidents or running and tripping. Nothing major, no broken bones. Just collateral damage from too much fun!
ReplyDeleteDoug
Doug, I was in the other side of the accident spectrum. I was just talking about this to my youngest the other day. I had a dislocated jaw, at least 5 rounds of stitches, cut my finger in half all during crazy Summer activities of playing wiffle ball, football, and riding bikes. Glad my progeny are a little less klutzy and more sturdy.
ReplyDeleteOn a different note - all please be aware that Doug and Karen’s blog (the great Bronze Age Babies) is active again this week for a limited time engagement. BitBA will also be joining in the Super Blog crossover this Thursday.
Cheers.
Sunburn ... yeah, I burn very easily, so I have to use sunscreen if I'm out for more than half an hour. We have mosquitoes here in Saskatchewan (some of which carry various diseases like West Nile), but it's been a dry spring so far, so maybe there won't be so many this year.
ReplyDeleteThe last couple years we've been inundated by tent caterpillars all over the trees; supposedly they come in cycles, so I'm hoping there won't be too many this year.
Steve DC- ouch; your 'hot foot' sounds most unpleasant. Probably even worse than the scorched feet one gets from scampering barefoot across a summer parking lot...
ReplyDeleteOh, and you and Edo make good mention of the devilishly annoying flying insect squadrons of the season.
Colin- Biting midges? Count me out.Mosquitos are bad enough. And yes, poison ivy blisters are truly awful; and they (in my case, anyway) would spread everywhere. And I do mean everywhere, if you catch my drift. It made for one very uncomfortable little boy.
Selenarch- leeches; yeesh. You must have had some fine swimming spots...
Doug and Marti- yes, accidents could fill another whole column. Marti, your finger episode must have been awful for your poor mother! And like you, my siblings and I always seemed to be getting stitches for one thing or another.
Oh, and as Marti said, be sure to visit the Bronze Age Babies with Doug and Karen! It'll be like a class reunion, only much more pleasant...
Leeches? Yep!
ReplyDeletePoison Ivy and Oak? Big and multiple yelps!
Impetigo? Big yep!
Sunburn? Yep but nothing extreme.
Mosquitoes? Yep.
Adult-only experiences;
In France there is a plant called Ortiz which I suspect is or a cousin off the UK's Stinging Nettles. Son of a gun...
About 10 years ago we had a Mite invasion. The invisible things bite at dusk but it takes 4-6 hours for the itching to start. 2 AM for several weeks in the summer the family went bat sh!t crazy!
- A subway car with a broken air conditioner inhabited by a not very recently bathed street person.
ReplyDelete- The overwhelming sickly sweet of hot garbage
While we don't have any poison ivy growing in NYC, I do love camping and hiking, however, I long ago discovered a veritable immunity to poison ivy. I am not REALLY immune, but it takes a lot of exposure to get me. I have had the experience of suddenly realizing I am in the middle of a patch of it with a friend and scurrying off to find not a mark on me and splotches all over the friend!
There were many constants to summer. Catching Lightning Bugs, sleepovers (with comics) in tents pitched in your friends' backyards, jumping on your bike to chase the mosquito truck around, desperately scrounging for money when you heard the first notes of the ice cream truck!!!
ReplyDeleteAs a ute ("Excuse me, what was that word?"), summer ended when you went into town to buy back to school clothes and wouldn't begin again until the day your mother cut all your school pants into shorts. Which leads us to my summer of HELL!!! Heretofore known as my "Summer Of HELL" for short.
I was junior high, so 7th or 8th grade. I was convinced all the kids, ALL the kids, would be wearing corduroy pants. I wanted to be one of the hip ones, so I convinced my mother to buy me corduroy pants instead of my usual jeans. I had six different colors, dark blue, light blue, red, green, brown and navy. Well, school ended and Mom cut all my pants into shorts... corduroy shorts!!! There is nothing worse for the hot Gulf Coast summers than running around in corduroy!!! But I survived...
(Now that I've got you alone,
There's something I wanna say.
A secret I have kept awhile.
But it feels right and I feel safe.
I know I am right.
I know this is the night.
Yeah, you; Making me come all undone.
Yeah, you; You have become,
The only one I will ever love.
Now that I've given myself,
Is there something that you wanna say?
Without you, I'd be unwell.
And it seems right and I feel safe
I know I am right.
I know this is the night.
Yeah, you; Making me come all undone.
Yeah, you; You have become,
The only one I will ever love).
I had plenty of summer mishaps over the years. One of the worst was a bicycle wreck in front of my house when I was ten. There was a pretty steep incline in front of my house and we would race down it......I lived in a small town and it was a pretty low traffic road at the time. I hit some loose gravel and my bike turned over and I slid about 20-30 feet and ended up with pretty bad road rash. Still hurts to type this.
ReplyDeleteOne summer I was riding my bicycle and was stung by a red wasp. My hand swelled to the size of a baseball mitt. We have lots of wasps, yellow-jackets, fire ants, etc....and they will ruin your day. One summer a few years ago, I had a yellow-jacket nest in my back yard, but couldn't find it. They ate me up for about two weeks, even chased me into the house. I had to get an exterminator, and they ate him up until he found them early one morning when the sunlight was hitting my back yard just right. Those things will make a preacher use profanity.
I worked on a golf course as a teenager and so I got the usual bad sunburns at the beginning of the summer......my hair would go from brown to blond every summer. Oddly enough, Poison Ivy never bothered me until I became an adult. I could lie in the stuff until I was about 23-24 and since then I get it if I get close to it.
As for mosquitoes......well, this is Mississippi......land of 97 degrees, 97% humidity for about three months each year. The mosquito is our State Bird. :)