Hotel living

Handy hints for people living in hotels/motels:

If you don't get up in time for housekeeping and eat mainly snacks from vending machines : two coke cans will fit into an empty pringles tub to maximise the length of time you can go without emptying your ridiculously tiny bins.

If you can't work the shower, and are scared to try jiggling anything else in case it breaks, try pulling the rim of the tap, where the water comes out as that is way less embarrassing than calling down to reception three times and eventually having to have someone from maintenance come up to show you.

Check everything you're going to want to use before unpacking because once you've got all your stuff out before finding out the TV doesn't work you'll be annoyed even if they kindly offer to move you to another room and will make a good five trips with arms full of trailing stuff before you've got everything from one to the other.

Watch the Family Guy episode where Peter gets a job as a maid, so that even when you are awoken at some ungodly hour by someone knocking on the door and screeching 'housekeeping' it will make you laugh rather than throw something at the door.

Take, keep and use earplugs - there is almost nothing other residents of hotels will not do,

in order to stop their fellow guests from sleeping, up to and including strangely rowdy parties, an apparent desire to rearrange whatever furniture can be moved without unscrewing it from the floor or weird, loud conversations with their friends in the wee hours of the morning about the middle east during which they display surprisingly comprehensive albeit wildly inaccurate views on the history of the conflicts taking place there.

Unfortunate juxtaposition in TV scheduling

For some reason, the folks at NOLA 38 have decided that an appropriate show to follow 'Reno 911' at 4.30 in the morning is 'Cops'. This means that if you kind of half watch the TV when drunk before bed, you get about half way through 'Cops' before thinking 'That's odd - this is hardly funny at all, and that one guy in the really short shorts has hardly even been in this episode. And it's a lot more gritty than normal, what's that all about?' before realising that the junky being cuffed is actually genuinely threatening the police with an attack with an infected needle, and you probably aren't going to see the sassy black one with all the junk in her trunk any time soon. I can only assume that somebody was actively encouraging this mindset when they came up with the idea of putting these two shows back to back, otherwise it's a desperately inappropriate oversight which, if we are anything to go by, has lead to a lot of late night confusion and disappointment.

What is with these 'reality' shows

The first time I saw Run's House, the 'reality' TV show about Rev Run and the antics of his hilarious family, I was understandably intrigued to see how life would play out when you spend your whole time with a full sized clock around your neck. Then I watched it, and realised that it was scripted, and poorly at that, making the whole premise pointless and resulting in some of the most ridiculously poor television I've ever seen.

Since then, our nocturnal lifestyle has lead to us watching TV at odd hours of the day or night, which has limited our viewing to some extent and resulted in us watching 'The Hills', the most entertaining element of which is the anger it inspires in the Boy Wonder who without fail declares all those involved to be hateful and gets genuinely agitated about their continued existence. I think the fact that every turgid, over emotional scene is played out in this weird fake reality but with peculiar camera angles, inane whiny conversation and utterly vacuous situations engineered apparently to entertain people who have yet to become bored of the pathetic teenage antics of people with nothing better to worry about than how they look and whether they can steal their friend's boyfriend without looking like a bitch on television. I find it amusingly crap, but it is worth it for the rage that 'The Hills' inspires in the Boy Wonder - watching him fume in fury at the fact that these people continue to occupy space on the planet is hilarious.

Eating at times which would make my mother faint

One of my Mum's rules about eating is the meals must take place within fairly narrowly time frames to be 'good for you' as in 'it's not good for you to eat this late'. Often, it doesn't even matter what you're eating, if it's not between 6 an 9pm, it's not good for you.

Since we've been here, we've lived a fairly irresponsible life, usually getting up between 2 or 3pm, staying up till around 5am and generally enjoying the fact that we aren't tied to any 'normal' timescales, but all this does mean that meal-times have become very much a theoretical thing, and despite the thousands of miles between us, I'm pretty sure that my Mum would have cross continental palpitations if she knew it was 2.49am and we've just finished dinner.

Crawfish boil fun

One of the awesome things about Louisiana is how friendly everyone is, and how keen they are to introduce us to traditional LA pastimes. As a result of this, on Monday, which was memorial day, we were invited by Shaggy, a friend of our new best friend to a crawfish boil at his house. A crawfish boil is a special kind of event, unlike anything we have in the UK, where food is served directly onto tables and enjoyed by all-comers.

Shaggy is a pro crawfish boiler, so somewhat of a master of the art of cooking up a vast (and I mean seriously vast) batch of crawfish in a huge pot with corn on the cob, mushrooms, potatoes and an incredible number of different spices. The food is fished out of the massive pot with a net and served directly onto the table where everyone tucks in with a gusto pretty much unseen in the UK. There is an art to eating crawfish which seems to yield a ridiculously small amount of crawfish meat - you pull the tail off the body and pretty much the whole body is discarded after sucking the 'juice' out of it, which is a delicate operation akin to trying to get the sherbert out of a flying saucer because if you suck too hard the spicy mix of crawfish innards and hot boil mixture shoots straight in to the back of your throat causing you to choke. The tail is then peeled leaving a piece of crawfish roughly the size of a small prawn, which is squeezed out of the hard tail shell and eaten.

I had eaten some pre-peeled crawfish while we've been here and tried to encourage the Boy Wonder to try some on the grounds that apart from his distaste at their appearance he would probably quite like the taste and wouldn't be put off by the texture, yet he had steadfastly refused to even countenance the idea. However, 20 minutes of badgering from Sam and a couple of demonstration runs, he was all over the mud bugs, eating not just one but several.

I think part of the appeal is the sociable element that comes with a crawfish boil - because you spend most of your time peeling the things, there's plenty of time to chat whilst you do it, and because you need to eat quite a lot (one tiny woman we met said she could easily eat five pounds), you end up sitting at the table together for quite a while, with people rotating in and out, mixing up the combinations and generally making for a very convivial atmosphere. You also get covered in crawfish boil mixture anywhere from the fingers to the elbows which breaks down some of the boundaries of what is normally considered proper eating etiquette and requires you to make friends with anyone who hasn't yet eaten or has washed their hands if you need anything passed or touched without wanting to get it covered, which is a handy conversation starter

All in all, the appeal of a crawfish boil goes well beyond the pleasure of actually eating the crawfish themselves, which even the locals admit is a high maintenance chore clearly originated by people with way more persistence than is currently necessary in procuring food - we're hoping that we will be able to find some kind of equivalent back home which will serve as a suitable substitute, but so far the only thing that I can come up with that even comes close is shelling peas, which I would enjoy, but I suspect would be a bit of a flop amongst our friends.

Life in Louisiana

There are some things about living in Southern Louisiana that I haven't managed to get used to yet, and probably never will, and some that I'm already a little too used to. For simplicity's sake, here a handy list:

Lightning - a little bit of lightning goes a long way in England. Not so in LA - apparently, every third day is grounds for a spectacular electrical storm, which separates us from the locals in as much as we're there going 'Whoa - what the fuck?!' and trying to take photos, whilst they are all so used to it, it barely registers on their conscious.

Accordions - after the jam at Deckbar on Wednesday we stopped in at the Bayou Park Tavern to see Lynn Drury on the recommendation of Sam, the bassist. Three or four songs in, I heard an accordion, but because there wasn't one on stage, I just assumed I was imagining it. It wasn't till I mentioned it to the Boy Wonder that he pointed out a guy playing accordion from a seat at the bar. Apparently spending any time in southern Louisiana makes 'hearing an accordion' the default position, and the presence of an actual accordion player is only marginally more likely than the alternative.

Gun and ammo shops - I'm not sure if you have to be born in a country that enshrines the right to bear arms in its constitution to find the regular sightings of gun shops commonplace, but I'm pretty sure I will never get the the point where I stop being surprised to see them along the highway. Massive ads for gun shows are also pretty common place, as are otherwise normal people telling you they have a gun.

Brass bands in the street - the first time we went out in the quarter and saw a 10 or so piece brass band just playing in the street, we were kind of enthralled and stopped for a look. Yesterday we went down to Frenchmen St, where there was a brass band playing in the street and we thought 'I hope everyone standing around gets out of the way before we run them over'.

Dungeon Master - the film

This film doesn't seem to have anything to do with the game, except perhaps having been written by avid fans given the essential lack of believable dialogue and ridiculous premise, but in the game's defence, the film is somehow less comprehensible and more disturbing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeonmaster

To read the Wikipedia entry, you'd think that the 'seven distinct story elements' within the film would be noticeable, whereas the reality is that there are seven almost identical 'trials' that the protagonist has to endure, each of which he overcomes by using his apparently multi-purpose, wrist mounted laser-shooting computer. Even the author of the Wiki on this clearly gave up trying to paint the plot as anything other than fairly lame as no sooner have they alluded to the riddles they must figure out than they point out the surprising versatility of X-CaliBR8 in putting an end to each obstacle as it appears.

It's mental - I can't quite work out whether the poorness of the dialogue is due to the makers' belief that they had such whizz bang special effects, or whether it's just because the whole thing was made by a bunch of super geeks who realised that not having had a girlfriend between them made them uniquely unqualified to write anything believable for the couple to say to one another, but either way this film is actually bad enough to be funny, making it yet another bonus late night find on crazy American TV.

The Outer Limits

3am in New Orleans can only mean one thing - The Outer Limits on NOLA 38. It's a hugely compelling show, with the opening credits being particularly appealing as you are warned that both the horizontal and vertical elements of your television picture are being controlled, and night after night we have come in from a gig, settled on the sofa for some wind down beers and flicked on the Outer Limits to freak us out before bed.

It's a little like 'Tales of the Unexpected', except that where those stories are sometimes confusing throughout only to have the whole point of the mystery revealed in the twist at the end, the Outer Limits is almost the opposite in that the storylines are often compelling until the last five minutes where the ending reveals a surprising lack of plot development and a strange petering out of all the storylines which appeared throughout to have potential to at least provide a slightly unexpected ending. Not that it stops us of course, because occasionally there is something in an episode which makes it worth watching regardless of how everything pans out, like this guy, from an episode called 'Mutant':

(Image from http://i.ytimg.com/vi/k7Ak2DdRCto/0.jpg)

Currently, we're watching one about a bee who's turned into a woman for some as yet undisclosed purpose (I suspect to stop the scientist who can talk to bees from making the most effective insecticide ever) and which will no doubt end with a bit of a whimper, but strangely be no less compelling for that.

ETA Indeed, the purpose of the bee girl was never fully revealed - she turned up at the entomologist's lab, pissed off his wife before killing her (using bees of course) and then tried to get him to marry her at which point he threw her out of the window. Not quite sure what the point was, but enjoying it nonetheless.

Thanks Ollie!

The weather here in New Orleans is hot - not just a bit hot, but ridiculously, relentlessly hot. However, one upside of this is that the other day I watched a weather report which featured a dishevelled looking man wafting himself with a piece of paper in front of a weather map and just saying 'It's HOT, New Orleans - have you been outside? There's no rain, it's just really hot!' much in the style of Ollie the weatherman on Family Guy, making me wonder whether that is just a comedy construct, or whether this is common enough as a format for weather reports that it's actually a pastiche.

The wrongness of rationing reading

One of the things that I know my Mum found difficult about my childhood is that my brother and I are both avid readers, to the point where we could often be found reading when we should have been sleeping/getting dressed/brushing our teeth/almost anything, forcing Mum to tell us to stop reading and do whatever it was we were supposed to be doing. As a teacher, I know it didn't come naturally to her to actively discourage such an edifying pursuit, and I'm sure that in amongst the frisson of annoyance, there was at least a little pride at the fact that one of my most dramatic episodes of misbehaviour as a child was burning a hole in my mattress with an anglepoise lamp whilst reading after lights out.

When we're at home, I always have a selection of books waiting to be read and whenever I feel as though I'm running low, there are several charity shops where I can find something suitable to replenish the supply. Whilst on the road however, my options are somewhat more limited - the books I brought with me were all finished before we left New York, and although we've been replenishing them relatively frequently, I find myself baulking at the prospect of paying full price for books, particularly as I hate to part with any books I have read (part OCD-like tendencies, part the fact that I occasionally remember almost the whole plot of a book except for some crucial piece of information and have to find it and read it again to get it out of my head), and I know that I won't be able to take months' worth of books home with me, so will be forced to abandon them here and then possibly buy them again once we're back home.

All this means that I am trying to limit the amount I read, which doesn't come naturally to me and given that I am in the habit of reading a lot, it's hard to switch of the automatic response to pick up a book. So, today I have scoured the internet for a suitable second hand bookshop and have located on which claims to have 35,000 books in store, so hopefully we can head off there tomorrow and see what they can offer in the way of cheap, interesting books.

American TV

There are several things about American TV that are weird and confusing - the breaks every five minutes for ads, the way they pretend the programme's coming back on when they are just telling you who supplied the closed captioning and 'other considerations', the insistence that we need to know that the people in the commercials are actors and that the scenarios depicted are dramatisations despite the fact that nothing vaguely 'dramatic' is happening and so on. But the thing I really don't understand is why they make what is inaccurately described 'background music' so freaking loud. We frequently have to turn the TV up too loud just to be able to make out the dialogue over the symphonic strains of whatever interchangeable dramatic music they have chosen to illustrate a point, and I am at a complete loss as to why. Perhaps it's because they have realised that a lot of the dialogue on Law and Order and other similar shows is pretty lame and they want to distract us from it by confusing us with overwhelming music.

Crazy 'mericans

One of the things I love about the US is the fact that they are surprisingly willing to give their businesses laughable names. Here are some prime examples:

http://www.cretinhomes.com/ - this company even has a section on their website called 'Cretin Staff'

http://www.bohnzone.com/ - yes - it's basically Bone Zone and it's not even a strip club, it's a car dealership

http://www.poupartsbakery.com/ - pronounced Poop Art, of course

We have also been enjoying ads for a second hand furniture showroom called Weiner Cort.

They do things differently here (4)

Watching a programme called 'Doctors' which is essentially a guy in scrubs, a guy in a lab coat and a guy in a suit recommending plastic surgery for people who have e-mailed in, cackhandedly demonstrating exactly what's involved in sucking out armpit fat on a mannequin and injecting a woman with 'lip-filler' in front of a grimacing studio audience. It's essentially an hour long advert for plastic surgery where they 'discuss' the various benefits of different types of surgery and tell women that their whole lives would be different if they were thinner.

The topic after the break is about a new set of scales which Tweets her weight to all her followers - an otherwise happy, healthy looking woman suddenly starts Tweeting depressing slimming mantras like 'a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips' and lists of foods she's not eating instead of anything of any interest or merit, whilst claiming that she loved the scales. Her gift for allowing them to broadcast details of her weight - a free subscription to one of those weird food systems where they deliver every meal to you so you're not supposed to need to keep any food in the house.

The Boy Wonder's currently singing a song he's made up called 'We are plastic surgeons' and making me wonder whether 10 minutes of it has been enough to desensitise him to the horror of what they're doing.

Remote locking

I remember the first car my parents had with remote locking - when you locked it, the horn/alarm made one noise, and when you unlocked it it made a slightly different noise. As far as I recall, there was a short period when a lot of cars did that, but that was a decade or so ago, and now we have reached a point where it's widely considered to be annoying and intrusive to have your car honking away every time you lock it. That message does not seem to have reached the US yet - every time someone comes in late or leaves early, you hear the sound of a car horn beeping away to let not just the person who owns the car, but everyone else in the vicinity know that the car is locked and the alarm is set. In a country where honking seems to be used as a substitute for braking, waiting, indicating and almost any other form of activity you can perform in a car, it's also quite off-putting to have every recently locked car honking away as you drive down the street, try to park outside a shop or just fill your car with petrol, and why anyone would need to draw so much attention to the fact they have an alarm is beyond me.

The alarm is another excessively overblown event - when one goes off you get a succession of different but equally annoying alarm sounds which play themselves on rotation until someone shuts it off. I have no idea why it should be deemed necessary that one alarm sound isn't enough, but from what we've heard, a loop of different beeps, whoops and two-tone wails is the absolute minimum required to draw attention to the commission of a crime. They like things loud here, and nothing short of eardrum damage will do.

The advertising jingle

Tragically, in the UK, the advertising jingle seems to have suffered a demise - there are occasional forays into the world of musical ads, but they are often pastiches of the traditional jingle, and whilst they are sometimes funny, they don't really have the charm that the classic jingles of my childhood had.

The US however, seems to have an non ironic love of the advertising jingle which is very appealing. One my current favourites is 'Never paint your house again' which is an ad for a ceramic house covering which will apparently last forever but the innovative nature of the substance is completely belied by the weird 80s rising jingle which sound like a child made it up in two seconds, which makes is surprisingly charming.

There's a spectacular one for a bartending school (which is a concept I enjoy anyway) which is a sung list of a load of different cocktails - who can resist a jingle about a Fuzzy Navel?

I also just heard one for a cheque cashing service which had a high octane female lead vocal jingle which sounded more like something for a fast food restaurant than a service which allows people to slip gradually behind their incomes over a course of months - "The only original, uniquely individual, One-stop money shop - check into cash".

French bread lies

The food here in Louisiana surpasses any other food we've had in the US - New York is kind of a mish mash, with excellent diners that serve a massive range of good food, but it's all much of a muchness and not that different from what you could get at home, albeit not 24/7 and not all in one place. Louisiana, however, has gumbo, red beans and rice, andouille sausage which the Boy Wonder informs me is delicious and they use pork as a seasoning, which shows impressive dedication to eating well. They owe a lot of their fantastic cuisine to the slew of cultures which have melded here, and the French influence is particularly evident as they have taken to heart the French love of rich food, with scant regard for the effects of trans-fats on the body.

And, as the local TV station keeps informing us, they also love French bread, which they sell in long, baguette style loaves almost everywhere that you can buy bread. They use it for po-boys - the unhealthily massive sandwiches which they stuff with more fillings than one person should eat in a sitting - and serve it with their delicious gumbo. However, the use of the term 'French' to describe their bread is a complete misnomer - it simply isn't French bread, I've been to France. I've wanted to move there just to eat bread and cheese for the rest of my (admittedly probably cut short by cholesterol poisoning) life. We've come home with loaves and loaves of French bread in the hope of defrosting it to its former glory to recreate the deliciousness of the experience. What they call 'French' bread here is just bread - sometimes it's ok, sometimes it's pretty bad, but it's never crusty, never has any of the fantastic soft inside and almost mouth hurtingly crusty outside. It's just bread, and given that you can't even export French flour because the French are so proud of their bread, I think they are stretching their definition of 'French' to describe their floppy, quick drying attempts at French bread. None of their bread is crusty - since we've been here we have searched every supermarket and food establishment we have entered for bread that has anything remotely resembling a crust, and it simply doesn't exist.

I love the food here - I have been more adventurous with my choices than ever before, which even extends to eating an oyster the other day (although it was fried and barely distinguishable from any other fried food in that sense), but their stretching of the definition of French bread is something with which I simply cannot get to grips.

Toothpaste and tequila

One of the things to which we have become accustomed over the last five days of jazz fest is the glorious taste of toothpaste and tequila. This is largely due to the inspirational placement of a frozen daquiri tent right by the entrance where we arrive at the fairgrounds, by also owes a nod to the incredible humidity that makes the 20 minute walk from our apartment to the festival a sweaty affair and one which demands almost instant refreshment. Beer wouldn't really hit the spot, but a mixture of margarita and 'N'awlins punch', which is mostly pink coloured rum, makes for a perfect arrival drink, and on occasion good road drink for the walk home.

So far, I have managed to balance perfectly on the line between dehydration and the need to use one of the portaloos on site. However, we have discovered that there are proper, permanent toilets in the grandstand which is somewhat of a relief and means that I have been able to make free with the beer without having to face my fear of plastic toilet facilities. Yet another reason why jazz fest is so much more civilised than any other festival I've been to.

Fest-iquette

Jazz fest is by far the most civilised festival I have ever had the pleasure of attending or even watching on television - not only do some of the tents have proper seating and carpets, but the gospel tent even has an air conditioning rig (albeit largely down to the fact that a large proportion of the performers are either old, wearing robes or both). Because everything finishes at 7 pm and there's no camping on site, they clear everything up in the evenings, change the toilets and even manage a pretty comprehensive job of putting sand and wood-chips down in the muddy areas, and everyone goes home or to their hotels every night to clean themselves up so there aren't those mud-covered ghouls that you see wondering around Glastonbury.

However, there are still those who manage to express their enthusiasm in really annoying ways, specifically those who bring along ten foot poles with flags, toys and other accessories on the top which they wave gleefully around regardless of whether they are standing in front of one of the big screens designed to aid everyone's views or in a tent which is full of people who have already seen a fishing pole in their lives and don't need another one waved in their faces while they are trying to listen to a band. There was one particular offender who managed to obscure the views of hundreds of people by planting a massive Japanese flag with a skull and crossbones underneath it right in the middle of one of the stages, so we had to continuously dodge back and forth to try and see Dr John busting some impressive moves, including a rather natty little number where he bent over and touched the floor.

Having said that, the quality of festival goers is by far higher than the gang of drugged up 'we're so crazy' students that you get at the kind of festivals I have frequented in the UK - for a start there's a good contingent of oldies rocking out which is always nice to see. Plus plenty of families with small children who are always good value particularly last week when there were a goodly number of mud puddles which were like catnip to the littlies and watching their repeated and unrelenting escape attempts was an entertaining pastime with just a tinge of guilt as we saw their parents continually breaking away from their attempts to relax to round up their offspring and try to park them in at least a semi-permanent position. The joys of the child free jazz fest experience certainly made for enjoyable viewing.

You don't know what you've got till it's gone

There are certain things that you don't really realise are essential to your happiness until you find yourself being deprived of them and over the last 7 weeks or so I have had ample chance to reflect on some of these:

1. Proper sized towels - I held out for a while using teeny tiny hotel and motel towels even though I had one with me because it seemed silly to add to our laundry loads with a towel when we could use those provided and have them laundered for us. But today I cracked and am sitting here wrapped in my big towel as I type so thrilled am I at having something which actually wraps a reasonable way around my body and isn't see-through thin.

2. Having a window in the bathroom - we haven't had a naturally lit bathroom since we left home - it's pretty rare in hotels, motels and other types of sleep shack anywhere and isn't normally the kind of thing I notice when we're away for a week or two but it has been nice to have one in our apartment.

3. Knowing where to buy things - not just where the shop is, but what each chain actually sells so that when you want something out of the ordinary (such as a pencil sharpener for example) you can accurately predict where you will be able to buy one. This is particularly important when you have to drive absolutely everywhere - nothing here is within walking distance of anything else, meaning that the simplest errand is a harrowing brush with American roads and drivers, the quality of both leaving much to be desired, for what might turn out to be a wildly unsuccessful mission to buy something really simple.

4. Having a fully equipped kitchen - so far we have managed with motel ice and the occasional fridge, but after being on the road for seven weeks you get to a point where eating out is no longer a treat, but such a regular occurrence that you start to long for the chance to pick exactly what you have for dinner and wish that you didn't have to get dressed before breakfast. We've been in an apartment for just under a week now, but we're already enjoying the ability to have cold drinks whenever we want and cook dinner for ourselves. Having said that, we are still eating off plastic and paper plates with plastic cutlery, so we are thinking of treating ourselves to some dirt cheap tableware in the next couple of days so we can fully appreciate the experience.

5. Being able to walk to places is definitely underrated - we're not averse to a longish stroll and have even been known to walk for a couple of hours under the right circumstances, but walking anywhere in the US seems to be a complete anathema to the locals meaning that everything is so spread out that it's almost impossible to sensibly walk between places. The heat in Louisiana does mean that it's easy to understand why people don't want to walk around too much without air conditioning, so I suppose it's hardly surprising, but it is a noticeable factor in our daily plans.

The downside of being delicious

Louisiana rocks, and we're having a blast here at Jazz fest and seeing more awesome bands in the evenings. The only downside is that I am so delicious -all day, and apparently all night too, I am being bitten to buggery, although inexplicably my right side is way more popular than my left, to the point where I now have about 50 bites down my right arm and another 10 or so on the right side of my back, whereas my left hand side has only been munched about 10-15 times in total. There seems to have been a bug dinner party on my forehead last night as I have four bites very close together which have taken the form of a long blister which looks absolutely revolting.

We have bought bug spray, but reading the warnings on the back has been enough to put me off using it thus far, including the opening line which is 'It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner which is not consistent with its labelling' before a long list of ways to use the spray which might kill or maim you, including information on how to contact Poison Control Centres if need be.

The upside of this is that I went to see a pharmacist at the local Walgreens who looked about 15, chewed gum loudly whilst looking with vagues distaste at my blistered arm, and recommended peroxide and Neosporin. We duly purchased both and came home for a mammoth bite treatment session which was strangely romantic, but during which we discovered that peroxide actually does bleach your skin so for quite a while I had reverse leopard-style spots around every bite which made me look like some weird Michael Jackon uber fan before it faded enough to leave the house for some more funk.

One of the reasons I find it particularly galling is that I am always nice to bugs - I never knowingly kill them, I try to save those that fall into my drinks, I actively discourage the Boy Wonder from hurting the ones that stray into our house, and yet he remains relatively unbitten whilst I am a red, blistered mess and have been munched in the most awkward places - elbows (meaning I can't lean properly on anything), shoulders (meaning putting a bra on is a particularly hazardous experience at the moment) and the backs of my hands and between my fingers meaning that I can't even wash and dry my hands without being reminded that I am a bulging, oozing blisterfest. Still, the Boy Wonder has been patrolling the house every night spraying every entry point with the terrifying chemical concoctions and (fingers crossed) the number of bites isn't actually increasing, so hopefully I will return to my non bitten state over the next week or so and survive this whole ordeal relatively unscathed.