jannie: that happened to me too. I thought I'd overslept. Went to kitchen to hurriedly get my breakfast and noticed the clocks there. I laughed and said 'someone' had April fooled me before I got out of bed. Shirley

Just had one crawling up my shorts today! Something kept tickling my upper thigh, close to the buttocks. I kept swatting at my shorts thinking they were sticking to me (it was hot and I had just come inside). I finally decided to pull up my shorts a bit and saw something crawling on my thigh. It quickly crawled up my hand and I dumped it in a bucket to see it more closely. I think it was a dog tick, too. I've had deer ticks before and they are much smaller and red. Here in NC, we get them a lot. We find them on the children at school many times. The playground is surrounded by tall pine trees and I think they just drop to the ground and crawl up their legs or fall on them. They will always travel upwards on your body. This is freaky: About 6 yrs. ago, we went to do some grave rubbings on a friends property that had some pre-civil war tombstones. It was heavily wooded. I never thought of ticks. When we walked out, my DD says "Look at all these little bugs on my legs." We looked and she was covered in deer ticks. By the time we got back to their cabin, we were all covered. I had about 20 around my stomach and navel and they had already attached. My DD and her 2 friends had many but none had attached. My husband.... here it comes.... had 80 ticks from his buttocks all the way to his ankles! I counted and removed 80 from him! All teeny tiny. He had one that became infected. I think I left the head attached and it became a cyst. He had to take antibiotics. Never did get Lyme. That in itself is amazing. After we showered, the bathroom floored was littered with ticks that had come off all our clothes. I was totally grossed out. I don't like the idea of an insect attaching itself to me and feeding. That makes my hair stand on end.

Not "clueless" at all! I am very familiar with the Gladney agency in Ft Worth. It's the agency many, many people would like to use (and I know people who have). So many that they no longer put how many applied and how many were accepted to adopt, and how long it took, on their web site (they used to do so). But the statistic that IS there is that in 2017, they placed only 128 infants through their "Domestic" program, and that includes children of ALL races. About 15 years ago, that figure was in the mid-300's. That is what is happening today. For a white couple wanting a healthy white infant (and is that really so wrong?), it has become very difficult to find a baby to adopt, especially through an agency that does all the very important checks of family and birth mother. Many couples do private adoptions but they may be fraught with peril, both legally and otherwise. And many of these are really just "buying" a baby as the birth mother suddenly needs "living expenses" that would allow her to live in the Carlyle Hotel in NYC during her entire pregnancy. I fully understand why many looking to adopt do not want a child of a race other than their own (it does come with problems FOR THE CHILD at some point - I know people who have done this), nor do they want a foreign child. A few years ago, Russian babies were in great demand - they looked "european" and they were available quickly. They were in demand until these babies started showing signs of fetal alcohol syndrome. Utter disaster! More and more young people are delaying marriage and children until they are not really young, they are middle-aged. And they then discover that their fertility is not what they had hoped for. They spend a fortune on IVF or surrogacy (often with an egg donor) and anything else technology can offer, as there are so few white infants out there to adopt. If I were looking to adopt, I sure wouldn't want that now grown baby showing up unannounced on my doorstep and then telling me I had ruined her childhood - actually her entire life.

Have you seen the movie "Love Hard?" It's a satire of online dating, where a woman gets involved with a guy who she made a great connection with online, but then finds out he's been using his friend's photo. The movie is a satire of the games we play, both in person and online, when dating. But one of the side plots involves the male lead, who wants to start a scented candle business geared towards men. He says, "It's an underserved market." Anyway, one of his projects is to try and capture the scent of his grandfather . . . eucalyptus for the essence of "Bengay."