White tail spider bite!

Something else that has happened in the last 2 weeks was that I was bitten by a spider (right arm).
I have no idea when or where, I just know the bite marks didn't heal for over a week, so I saw the doctor who suspected it was a white tail spider...yuck! They like to hide in warm material like curtains or sheets. There are many places I could have met him...no way to determine...

I was led to believe that white tails are so full of bacteria, they cause huge, dark swelling of the affected limb, sometimes leading to amputation. If I had seen a white tail, I wouldn't have gone near it! (without insect spray). If I knew it was that, I would've gone to the doctor straight away!

The doctor used words like, "aggressive" and "angry" to describe the bite site. It was nasty, like a big scab, surrounded by swollen skin and bumps like hives.

Well, I'm happy to say that after a week of antibiotics, the skin is mostly healed. Now it's just a bit of dermatitis...reaction to the bite maybe.

What shocks me the most is how many people don't know what a white tail looks like! Maybe I just presumed everybody knows because of growing up in the country....where white tails were so common, we just killed them when we saw them. Every kid knew not to go near them. But as I said, I grew up in the country, so maybe in the city less people are exposed to them as often.

I have no pictures...the antibiotics moved into action quickly :)

Easter ponderings

Happy Easter!

I managed not to blog for the whole of March...

Something interesting happened this week...a girl from another country asked why Aussies celebrate Easter and Christmas...like she was surprised at how little 'spiritual' holidays we get, but didn't know the reason for the holidays anyway.

When you grow up in a supposedly "Christian country", it's presumed everybody knows what Easter and Christmas are about...even if they don't believe it. At least, that's how it felt in the 80's and 90's... So at worst the atheists get a day off thanks to the Christians...

These days, it isn't so... people from all over the world are immigrating here, bringing with them their cultures and beliefs... and now we're seeing the reasons for the holidays are no longer obvious and an 'everybody knows' topic. Many kids don't even know what the cross on a hot cross bus is... when I was a kid, you were considered dumb if you didn't know that!

When I mentioned a story about a little kid telling my friend while she was teaching RE (Religious Education), that the cross is to tell you where to cut it...another person said she didn't even know that! She was brought up in Australia and is older than me...

Those are the things that make you ponder.... it's one thing to grow up in a Christian country, and another thing to actually live as a Christian in that country that no longer embraces that foundation. Life has definitely changed in the last 30years!