I'm being hunted...

There is a mosquito in my apartment the size of a short-wing hawk. She periodically likes to pop up, fake out a "I'm gonna land on you" thing, and then once I yelp, throw my notes aside, and go after her, she disappears into some unforeseen location to stalk me again the moment I put my stuff back together.

This thing is large enough that I suspect she's already taken a fair sample from me and just really liked the taste of tea and despair. I imagine if I do ever manage to end her miserable life, it will throw up a blood spatter like I'm making mosquito torture porn (Cary Elwes, what have you done? I can never watch the Princess Bride again).

If she would just pick a spot, bite me, and then screw off to some other location to bother others, that would be fine. It can add to my other 15 bites that I got from neglecting to use DEET every time I run (I want dengue; I do; it has a funny name), but I think this one is just lurking around and nipping me periodically, causing small but numerous welts, which I dislike. What also sucks is that it's 2:30 in the morning which means I KNOW she could just slip right on over to another apartment where there would be a complacent sleeping victim just waiting to get anemia, but no. She enjoys the hunt, the thrill, the adrenaline rush. Do mosquitoes have adrenaline? Do they have alpha and beta receptors? Moving on.

Happy Puritan Imperialism Day! For those horribly offended, I didn't like Thanksgiving any more last year, so get used to it. This is one of the few holidays I don't miss, except for the fact that it marks the time when I begin enjoying Christmas decorations and stop being pissed off by them.

See, I LOVE the holiday season minus the whole gorge yourself on boring food one, and I love the materialistic trappings of Christmas. Like everyone else that has written anything about Christmas ever, I don't enjoy getting my 4th of July infringed on by it, so I resolve this by being jaded and pissy about Christmas trappings and drowning out mall music with my ipod right until the day after Thanksgiving. Then I can throw myself into them with unabashed joy without suffering the "Season Sickness" that affects so many. Though I haven't gone out on Black Friday since I discovered Amazon.com in the late 90s. A discount on children's toys just isn't sufficient for me to suffer the ruptured spleen from the elbow of a soccer mom. I need my secondary lymphoid organs to combat my mosquito-related infections.

Of course, in Grenada, Thanksgiving is in October, which makes me conflicted by this "no celebration until after Thanksgiving" standard, because starting the holiday season in late October is still annoying.

Speaking of "in Grenada", "in Grenada", I got bitten by a donkey on my evening jog.

Now granted, it was totally my fault, didn't break the skin, didn't really hurt, and I was feeding it while it was behind a fence with the help of an awesome woman that's the wife of one of the vet anatomy professors, but saying "When I went to medical school, I got bitten by a donkey" just sounds so much more hardcore. I'm *Thankful* (see, I can be festive) for not getting donkey rabies, since donkey bites are the leading cause of donkey rabies. You don't wanna know the second, but it happens a lot in Tijuana.

I've also rediscovered that few things are cuter than baby donkeys. Awwwwww.

On the donkey feeding, thanks to cool wife-of-prof, Marty, I learned that there are two types of tamarind, and the one that isn't made into suspicious-tasting candy is a really good base feed for farm animals. I mention this because it means I now know exactly one fact more about feeding donkeys than I do about immunology. A shame that the final on Monday is on the latter!