Waging the War On Fleas

Klea got a flea.

I want to say that she got it from one of the thousands of leaves that my apartment complex has failed to rake up. And truth be told, she probably did.

But it would have died on site if I had been diligent about her flea treatments. I usually am in the summertime. This fall called for a variety of cutbacks as I was scrimping to pay off the last of my debt.

All the same, she scratched for a few days but it didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary. She's always been the one to drag her body around my carpets. But I came home and she had scratched a bald spot into her fur. I decided to give her a bath and a good brushing, hoping that she was just dirty. Instead, I found a flea.

Immediately, I went to the store and bought shampoo, drops, and carpet cleaner. I'm trying to avoid bombing at all costs. This is not the first time I've had to deal with fleas. I had a very filthy roommate with a very filthy cat.

Poor Klea has endured a flea bath every week for the last month now. I've been checking her everyday since Sunday and I haven't seen any inkling that there's anything still hanging out in her fur. Not even any tiny flea carcasses.

This is the hardest battle I've ever fought. I know my generation hasn't made many stands or organized any national protests, but I feel like I have, if only in my own home.

Where There's a Flea, There's a Major Meltdown

Sunday night is bath night for the animals. It's been that way since I can remember. Now, I know that some people don't believe in doing any work at all on Sundays but we are not those people. As I brushed Klea to get her ready for the inevitable, I spotted a tiny, black, walking spec in the clump of fur. I pulled the fur ball out of my ShedEnder and whispered, "Please don't be a flea".

Slightly panicking, I pulled her thick fur apart to look for more of these minute bastards. I found one. Angry, at myself not at Klea, I picked myself up off the floor, threw on my coat, and made way to my local pet store. I cannot explain how pissed off I was/am at myself. Klea's been scratching for days. When I got home on Wednesday, she had scratched a bald spot into her fur.

If you remember what we went through with Ginger, I thought that Klea might be going through the same thing. Or that it could be stress or the change in her diet. It never once crossed my mind that it could be fleas because she's never had fleas. It never occured to me that she didn't have fleas because I was super vigilant about treatments. (Just thinking about that tick makes me want to upchuck all over again).

Anyway, around 7:30 last night, Klea got a flea bath so serious that it turned her fur blue (which then took 3 rinses to get out). And then she got the flea dip. Then I put her in the storage room so that I could sprinkle carpet fresh for fleas and get it all vacuumed up. I will not tolerate bugs.

You got me once Mr. Flea, but now its game on.

Weekend Plans

This past weekend, Klea and I played it pretty safe. I spent more time at home than I have in the last month and she spent all of her time trying to bury the rawhide bone I gave her over a week ago.

First, she put it in my shoe cubby. Which I discovered as she growled at me while I was busy putting away my shoes. Then she put it in the storage room between the ironing board and the pantry shelf. But she nearly lost her mind when I went to fold the ironing board up and put it away.

When I was tired of picking up and decided to sit down to a delicious Greek meal, she hopped up on the sofa next to me and did this:

That's her digging up my coat to plant the bone safely beneath it. (I got several shots of her nudging the coat back over it to rehide her bone but they didn't come out as well.) She took one look at me looking at her and promptly unburied her bone to hide it someplace new.
This morning when I woke up, I stepped on the doggone bone. There it was, laying in the middle of my bedroom floor unattended. She came speeding into the room when she heard me yelp and after looking at me with indignance, picked up her bone and carted it somewhere new.

I really want her to just eat the stupid thing already.