OK so now that I am itchy as hell, and completely grossed out..THIS is what I have been missing?? lordy be! I've barely been able to get online..2 mins here and there..and now this..I need a shower, Lysol, Bleach and Raid, lol. I have to go read more so I know what you all are talking about..I am assuming Annette found some lovelies on her babies? I thought I did today too..lil white things on one of the leaves..but I think it may have been perlite dust? I went to smush em and they were hard. With how I have been spraying and misting, and wiping, I dont see how anything can be on there. Still lookin for lil green wormies..dang it my skin is crawling..why did I read this? Why did I click on that link!?!?!? I want new pillows.

Ugh, so it seems the fleas must have just gone into 'hibernation' for the winter. A few weeks ago I was out in the garden and came back in and noticed bites. I checked again and found fleas. As far as bug ID, I'm positive these are fleas, and that they are biting me (I've seen them sucking blood before so I know). And they are managing to cling to me and get up above my lower extremities - I've seen several bites around my waist area... actually, there are times where I'm squatting so they might be jumping onto my shirt/waist area then. Anyway, the plausible explanation is that there are rodents or animals that are either hanging around in the yard or hiding under the deck. I'm not sure how to figure this out though because I *never* see any animals out there. That's with the exception of the one time I saw a possum on the yard wall. Actually, the other day I came across a dead rat (or larger field mouse?) that was all dehydrated and decomposing. I'm thinking once I get rid of whatever animals are hanging around the garden, the fleas should be gone as well. This whole thing is pretty irritating though. I even asked a terminator about spraying the yard and he said he could but warned that the problem won't necessarily go away if there are animals bringing the fleas into the yard in the first place. Ughh, I don't know what to do. This post was edited by jplee3 on Mon, May 6, 13 at 19:30

Thanks for all your hard work Karen! Can't wait to read it in its entirety. Jodi-

Deee, I didn't love the green counters, but I thought they were better looking in that setting than the faux painting. She could have painted the oak trim on the counter and at the bottom of the cabs white (she did the latter as well as faux painting the counter). I don't know how to say this without getting into trouble :) but here goes--- you would not expect to see a marble bathroom in a mobile home, for example, or a schonbeck chandelier in a small rustic cabin, for perfectly reasonable economic and design reasons. If you saw something that looked like a marble bathroom in a mobile home you would know at once that something was wrong, that it was fake. And to me that would make it look cheap. Formica is what it is, and there's nothing wrong with it. Formica painted to look like something else is like a 70 year old wearing a miniskirt trying to be something she's not.