When I woke up the other day with a cluster of itchy bites on one arm, I thought "uh-oh." Having had, many years ago, a cat that suffered a serious flea infestation and having grown up in the Middle East, I do know what flea bites look like. These looked suspiciously familiar.

Wouldncha know it, Cassie and Ruby sleep on my bed.

So I dropped everything and began Flea Eradication. Mercifully, my house doesn't have carpets. So a vacuum attack is relatively easy to deploy and relatively effective. Alongside that: launder every piece of fabric in or near the bedrooms, including any- and everything the dogs have ever laid down on.

This elicited six hours' worth of laundry loads. {sigh}

Laundered both dogs thoroughly, too, after having soaked their most vulnerable spots in olive oil.

After wearing myself out with these excesses, I eventually gave up.

Suspiciously, neither dog ever scratched. And equally suspicious, no more "fleas" came a-biting. Evidently the pattern of bites was left by a mosquito on meth. It is skeeter season here in lovely uptown Arizona, and several other bites on the arms are clear and present mosquito attacks.

Oh well. Now the bedrooms are very, VERY clean. So are the dogs.

But meanwhile, get a load of THIS wild story from a friend who lives in San Francisco. Can you BELIEVE the outrageousness?????

What on earth would you do if some moron "friend" left a dog for you to dogsit when she must have known it had fleas? And when you have a six-month-old baby and a constantly painful chronic condition?

Personally, because I'm not a nice lady, I would have taken the dog to the vet, had it dipped, and left it there to be boarded until the moron got back from whatever junket she was making. I also would have made her pay for the repair and painting of the damaged door and the cost of having a professional come in and exterminate the bugs. If she declined, I would have threatened to sue her a$$ over the dog bites.

But my friend is a nice lady. So she did none of the above.

Et vous?