Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 749-750)
Hello Everyone!
Making ashes, A war on pestilence, Frigging mites, An unknown abscess & Knowing my limits!
I have been feeling quite moody the last few days and have been getting outdoors and doing stuff throughout the day to help keep me from 'sitting still' and dwelling on things. Do not get me wrong because I still dwell on it all but at least I am 'in motion' and getting some much needed exercise.
Whoa I did not make it very far on the writing this morning before heading outdoors and building a fire to start the process of making ashes and disposing of the burnables. Having just had a fire yesterday (and already being low on firewood) it took a good bit of scrambling around to collect some but eventually I had enough kindling to get things going.
Aside from that I spent the day doing a bunch of domestic stuff in an effort to get a handle on a new pest situation. Apparently not only do I have the fleas to contend with but also some kind of ear mite that is unfortunately affecting one of the dogs.
As far as the fleas go I have done a heck of a job at getting them reigned in recently and like I mentioned before freezing all the bedding sure helped tremendously on that front. The mites are my latest foe and now that I have spent almost every cent of fiat that I had on medicines and treatments for them... I am eagerly awaiting the packages to arrive.
Mites themselves are some pretty damned gross little buggers and some varieties of them can be extremely harmful (like the scabies mites) but hell even the ear mites can cause deafness and a number of other problems in an older dog. From everything that I have been reading on the topic it seems like no matter what type of mite infestation there is to deal with... getting rid of them is quite difficult.
Per usual my first line of defense has been spreading food grade diatomaceous earth over everything that I can in the cabin. I have also been lightly dusting all the dogs with it to help kill any living fleas or mites that come in contact with it.
I am unsure if I can wipe the mites out without either throwing the mattress in the cabin away entirely or freezing it outdoors several times... which might not happen anytime soon because the nightly temperatures have been staying quite warm. If it comes down to throwing it away I will damn sure do it but I cannot afford a new mattress... and getting a used one is why I have such a pest problem currently!
All that jazz aside. I made a stomach turning discovery today in the form of a massive abscess near the center of my back (right over my spine) and whoa was it full of some nasty smelling purulent discharge. I am really unsure what is going on there because it does not hurt (the way a brown recluse bite tends to) but ugh once I got most of the discharge out I discovered that its quite the crater because the entire tip of my thumb fits in it... and its 'squishy' much further down in there than how far I could stomach inserting my thumb into it.
On the bright side at least I now know part of why I have been having some feverish days/nights, feeling mildly ill-tempered and occasionally becoming so lethargic that all I can do is sleep. I have no idea how long that infection has been going on for (or how long my body has been fighting it off) but I am going to have to find some more antibiotics and start myself on a full course of them as soon as possible.
Earlier today I did a few brief searches online for amoxicillin for dogs or fish but whoa apparently all those products are no longer available like they were a few years ago. I do have some amoxicillin left (from the last time I purchased it) but I do not think there is quite enough of them left to fight off that large of an infection.
Obviously I am facing some challenges at the moment and of course there is the housing insecurity thing overshadowing everything as well which damn sure is not helping especially given how stressed just thinking of it makes me feel. So with my morale in the can, my health a wreck, no resources to move and nowhere to move to even if I had the damned resources... I am at a loss as to what the hell to do in life.
Something that I have expressed numerous times of late is that I just do not currently have it in me to start over from scratch again. Having spent a lifetime exploring my limits I am well aware that at the moment I am not in the kind of physical or mental shape that doing such an endeavor requires. The gear scenario is problematic also but I must digress lest I get riled up thinking about it!
Well, I dislike ending this entry on that note but there you have it. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
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