blame the bugs, man

i should be asleep right now- but obviously, i am not.

i blame the music. more precisely, i blame the bad music running through my head. if i'd blogged earlier, i could've had cool songs in my head. van halen's "hot for teacher" played on my mental jukebox while reading a related article in the latest issue of details magazine. i heard one of my favorite U2 songs in the car on the way to the radio station- "desire" was stuck in my head for a good half an hour after i got out of the car, but i got sidetracked and forgot to sit down and write about it.

right now, however, it neither bono nor diamond dave are singing in my mind. no, readers, currently a combination of "this is your night" by some 90s one hit wonder (that i will undoubtedly think of later)and "magic stick" is running through my head. it does not make me happy. it is not bringin a smile to my face as i type this. to make matters worse, it seems that my next door neighbor (the downside of apartment living) has decided that 11:45 at night is an ideal time TO MOVE FURNITURE. if one more thing slams up against our shared wall, i will go over there, knock on her door, and not so politely offer my services. i am so glad i sleep in the other bedroom, where i hear nothing but.....mostly silence, unless a dog has found stubby, the black and white cat without a tail that roams around the complex....oh, and whatever the loud popping noise was i heard a little over half an hour ago.

so i'm being kept awake by two annoyingly bad songs....and a mysterious bite on my foot. i acquired it yesterday, when the kids and i were playing in the elmo sprinkler at school. naturally, i had my shoes off, and of course i ended my afternoon by discovering i had a bug bite of some sort on my foot. i'd written off the assailant as a mosquito or perhaps a chigger, until this afternoon, while the kids were napping, when i reached down to scratch the itch inside my shoe and realized that the pain that followed meant an attack from a fire ant was more likely. ah, yes- fire ants. another southern feature not mentioned in the tourism pamphlets for south carolina. we did not have such beasts in missouri, nor in baltimore, for that matter.....or maybe i just didn't run in the right circles. they're nasty little ants that i have yet to learn how to distinguish from regular, docile, yankee ants. the big difference between the two kinds of ants is that the fire ants bite- a lot. in fact, the bite on my right foot seems to actually be three bites....at least that's what i think i saw when i was trying to figure out why my ankle had swollen during the course of the day. first the bites itch, then they burn.....terrible.

while were talking about things not mentioned in south carolina's tourism pamphlets, i should probably share two very important words with you: palmetto bugs. perhaps you know their cousins- roaches? palmetto bugs are roaches so large that i believe three or four of them ganged up on one of our past state governors and demanded to be called "palmetto bugs", instead of roaches, because of both the implied patriotism (the palmetto tree is on our flag, for goodness sakes), and because they're large enough to be our state bird. they seem to diappear in the winter, but in the summer, it would be wise to stomp around in big, heavy shoes to provide maximum squishability. i certainly wouldn't want to run into one of them barefoot. in fact, i wouldn't want to run into one period. every time i encounter one, i find the nearest adult to stomp (or otherwise incapacitate) it for me. blech.

somehow, after all that, ace of base's "it's a beautiful life" has entered my head. i'm not sure how or why this has happened, but maybe it's enough to put me to sleep.