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 the garden this morning.” And then I said to the employee, I said, “You need to take this tick off her shirt. Take it back to your bathroom. And flush it.” I said, “Don’t throw it in a trash can somewhere because it will climb out, don’t try and crush it because they’re hard-shelled and they’re flat. They’re hard to crush. You need to flush it.” So he did, he took the tick. [Laughter]. He took the tick, and he walked off. I don’t know. I have no idea where the restrooms are in Staples but, so the lady and I stood there waiting for him to come back because she was not done discussing with him. And I need, still needed to ask my question and he took a long long time. So either he was entirely grossed out by this, or he was hoping we would go away, or something, I don’t know. But eventually he did come back and he finished his discussion with the lady. And when it was my turn, I thanked him for taking care of the tick and asked him my question. And luckily my question was simple, and he answered it and walked away. And, so yeah. Those are my, those are the only tick stories that I have.