I have a tick story.  My daughter lives in Northern Wisconsin. And they have many, many more ticks there than we have here. And so, when she came to visit a few years ago, she was brushing her dogs --  she has three Border Collies -- and she was brushing her dogs on my living room floor, and she found two ticks on them, obviously brought from Wisconsin. So, at the time, I had a garbage disposal in my kitchen sink, and she dropped them into the garbage disposal and turned it on for a moment and thought they were taken care of. Well, later, I don't remember if it was later that day or if it was even the next day, she had gone somewhere, and I was doing something at the kitchen sink. And here on the edge of the sink was a tick. And it's like, “Oh, my gosh! Where did that come from?” And then I remembered her dropping those two down the drain. And, obviously the garbage disposal had not taken care of them. So I picked it up, and I flushed it.  Okay. So, at that point, I wonder where the other one is. And I looked around and sure enough, the other one was on the floor. It had already climbed down -- climbed out the drain, climbed up the sink, climbed across the cupboard, climbed down the cupboard, and was on the floor. And I was horrified. So I picked that one up and I took it into the bathroom and flushed it also. So they are, they’re persistent and they, you have to be positive that you kill them when you see them.  My second tick story, was, took place in Staples, just, I think it was just last year. And there was another lady who was being helped to by a Staples employee. And I was waiting to ask the employee a question also. And she had her back to me, and on her back, on her shirt, on the outside of her shirt, was a tick, slowly crawling up her back, and I was like, “Gasp!” And, I said to -- I interrupted them, and I said to them, I said, I said to the lady, I said, “You have a tick on your back.” And she's like, “Oh dear, you know I must have gotten it out in…

Tell us about something that seemed like a major threat earlier in life, but turned out to be pretty irrelevant. Needles. Oh my gosh, was I afraid of needles. When I was younger. I was one of those types of kids that like when my parents told me I was gonna get a flu shot, I would be obsessing over it all day, like I would not sleep the night before, I would be freaking out at school. I would be thinking all day, "I'm getting a flu shot. I'm getting a flu shot. I'm getting a flu shot. Oh my gosh, I'm getting a flu shot." Would get home, immediately lock myself in my room. Like refuse to get out of the car. I actually jumped out of a moving car one time to try to avoid getting a flu shot. Lock myself in the bathroom at the doctor’s, kick and scream and like attack the doctors. Not that I like wanted to hurt the doctors but more like this was an involuntary action because I was just so afraid of needles. Having to get held down, until I was probably like 16, I had these issues. But I'm very proud of myself and how far I've come over the past three years where I can ki- -- like, I'm still like very afraid of it, but I don't have that crazy reaction anymore. And, you know, that's just a reminder that even if stuff like that kind of controls your life, that fear, that you can overcome it. If you work at it and just tell yourself like, "You can do it, you can get through this."

As a kid, I was very afraid of trains and train tracks. And I can remember in -- being in the car -- when we would drive over train tracks, I would -- I could feel the anxiety welling up in my chest and go -- and being so scared we were gonna, like, hit a train. Or when the train would come by and you'd have to stop at the gate, and the loudness of the train whistle and the train, would be so scary to me. And I would have to plug my ears. I'd be, like, humming so I couldn't hear it. But, I conquered that fear because I had a friend. Well, he was -- I guess he was a friend, but he was also, like, a big crush of mine in high school. This kid and I went -- we were hanging out at night, and I thought, maybe someday --  I was hoping we would be a couple. And we’re hanging out, and just -- in the middle of the night and stuff. And we went for a walk, and he took me to the train track. And I was like, “I am too scared. I am not going anywhere near that train track.”  And he was like, “It's fine. It's fine. It's nothing to be scared of.” And he's like, “You just don't have -- just don't walk on the track. You can stand next to it as it goes by. It's fine. And you're not going to get hit.”  And, I was like, “No, no, no. That's too scary. We have to get away. We have to get away.” And then a train, you could hear in the distance, was coming.  And he's like, “Nope, stay here. Stay here. We're not leaving.”  And so, he stood, like, pretty near the train track and then, I stood a little ways away and watched him. And the train came by and, like, it blew his hair back, and he just, like, closed his eyes and put his hands out and was, like feeling the wind of the train go by. And he just looked like he was having the greatest moment of his life. And I saw him do that, and I moved a little bit closer and I felt the wind, too. And then, I was like, “Hey, this isn't so bad. This…