originally posted November 13, 2006

Every night, when I put my head on the pillow, I think of the tiny dust mites awakened from their slumber, excited, and emaciated. They climb through the weave of the pillow, the mattress, and the sheets to eat my dead skin. These are ugly insects. Creepy insects.

Since moving to Costa Rica, I’ve had intimate contact with all sorts of tiny, flesh eating, biting, scratching, and venomous bugs. The first house I moved into had fleas. It took a small army of masked men (they arrived in a car that looked like a mouse), to eradicate the infestation after I’d tried everything: garlic, mint, bay leaves, shampoos……etc. My husband’s midsection was riddled with bites (he’d tangled with a bush where hundreds of tiny fleas hid), and they preferred my ankles, and one of my dogs pink belly. Scratching vigorously and out of options, we called in the chemicals.

When my daughter was three, we got head lice from a friend of hers. I should say, I got head lice; no one else in my family did. If a bug that bites knows I am within 50 feet, it will find me. I threw all stereotypes I held that dirty, unclean, slovenly people are the only ones to get such a louse. There I was, strands of hair covered in nits and bugs, scratching my scalp without abandon.
I refused to put any chemicals on my head. I didn’t even have to read about the caustic shampoos to know instinctively that they caused brain cancer or at least a major headache. Instead, I decided to suffocate, drown, or burn the insects until they were gone. I washed and washed my hair until my scalp started to flake. I went through my hair with a nit comb and picked off eggs and flicked adult lice into cups of water. I slept with a shower cap on; my hair soaked in rosemary oil. When I washed my hair again, I applied as much heat as I could to my hair and scalp with a hairdryer.

I became quite familiar with the life cycle of lice. When the bugs became small, I knew they were most likely in the final hatching, and sure enough, after a week they were gone. I just read on Google News that someone invented a heater, a little stronger than a hair dryer, to kill lice. If only someone would have asked me.

This phenomenon happens to me a lot. I already knew or have invented something that someone else gets rich on. But sucked into the feverish world of childrearing, I barely have time to solve one problem and I’m on to the next. And, I never have a pen or a piece of paper around to write down my ideas.

Maybe if I could have an assistant, or better yet, a clone, I could patent a long list of ideas that could save the world or at least make it a lot less irritating.

Let’s see….I know I’ve got it written down, I had an idea about eternal youth, no it was a something about an alternative energy source, no, no, it was the barrette that never falls out of a little girl’s hair….shoot, if I could only find that piece of paper; I know I’ve written it down somewhere.