After years of never getting bit by one of these buggers at Scout camp, I slept in Tom Bailey's house last night and woke up this morning with a tick in my left bicep.  The upper arm, where the Boy Scout Tome of Occult Knowledge says they won't go.  Right.  Then, painfully enough, the Baileys had no tweezers so I had to remove the blasted thing with a pair of needle-nosed pliers.  I got it out and then went to the library, where I researched the little bastard this morning and found out that it's a blacklegged tick, until recently known as the "deer tick."  They say that it usually requires at least 24 hours to actually transmit Lyme Disease, so...I should be safe.  God, I hope so.  The last thing I need is for my mother to think that I'm faking some other ailment.  As Marsha claims about my knee.

And another lesson:  Don't bike the hill to Bailey Rock with a bum knee.  Walking probably won't be that easy afterward.

And lastly:  I highly recommend the short story "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx.  It's very short, maybe a 15-20 minute read (though I read pretty quickly), and its length makes the distance, the silence, the passage of time that much more powerful.  It's a good one.