Mosquitoes, mosquitoes, those darn mosquitoes.

It's early Friday afternoon, and I've been trying to write a post for a few days now and nothing is coming to mind. The kid and I were playing "Rescue in the water and I'm the sea captain" game in the playground when our 4 o'clock D.D.D chased us back upstairs. I nicknamed this daily occurrence, D.D.D. which stands for Daily Dengue Dose and is basically a guy that walks the perimeter of the property with what looks like a leaf blower that spews pesticides in the form of stinky blue smoke that floats off with the wind in swirls of hot air. The rank smoke is supposed to kill the mosquitoes that carry the dengue fever which is a big problem in tropical places.

Last year, I was sitting in the dengue ward at a hospital because I had a weird dizzy spell which turned out to be a condition nicknamed the "foreigner-can't-adapt-to-the-heat-disease" by the local doctors and while I was sitting in a chair being re-hydrated and making a mental list of all the infected places not to touch on my way out, people were being put through at a steady pace to be treated for dengue fever. Dengue apparently feels like a really bad flu, not unlike the flu that was going around like wild fire around my neighborhood over the Christmas holidays; fever, headache, and muscle and joint pain. Just your general pin-you-down-into-bed-moaning kind of flu without a vaccine. This particular female mosquito borne fever is doubly evil because if you get once, you 'll probably just feel crappy for a while and get over it, but it makes you susceptible to a hemorrhagic version of the same fever that basically turns your insides to a bloody mess. Yum.

So if we happen to be in the pool when the D.D.D guy starts up his pesticide blower, we hold our breath or if we can we run upstairs to our apartment and close the windows. What can we do? Ingest chemicals designed to kill bugs or risk turning into a ziplock bag of blood? You tell me. I do have to say that I'm counting the days when the mosquito season dries up and I don't have to put on repellent every day.

This job has to be one of the worse jobs ever.