Yeah, Ginger, I have only sympathy for you, but I have a lot of it.

ION this is me NOT freaking out because my oldest* friend casually mentioned in an email that she's had her thyroid taken out - "cancer, didn't spread, back to the doctor in six months". But then I suppose I might have done the same thing in her shoes, waiting till I knew for sure if I was OK for the moment or if I was in for a long haul fight before sharing that news amongst non-family, far-flung friends.

• Not the oldest person I'm friends with, but she is six months older than I am and my mother remembers holding her while pregnant with me.

Itching sucks. I'd almost rather be in pain than have uncontrollable itching. There's no equivalent of Tylenol for itching! "They" really need to get to work on discovering an anti-itch medicine.

ION, the first tow-truck hauling a car of this snowfall just went by. That didn't take long. This snow is coming down fast. We've accumulated an inch or more in an hour.

In cat food news, I've found a wet food that has no grain or soy, it's Sheba, and my cats LURVE it. They don't leave a bit of this to waste. Percy the Emo Cat wants it bad enough that he'll actually eat at the same time as the other two when I give them this. It's a small miracle. He's over there right now, chomping on Murray's leftovers like he hasn't had food in a week. I believe we're switching to this.

I had given them Soulistic, which is also just meat, and they liked it, but I think there's too much "gelee" in it for their taste. This Sheba is stinky, and I think that's making the difference. Cats really like food with a strong smell.

My friend who has psoriasis taught me, when I had an allergy on my face that was making me nuts to put cold water on something that itches...it works, briefly.(Itching makes me insane, still)

erika, that's what my mom always did when her eczema was acting up. Topical cortisone can help, too, but I think you have to be careful not to overdo it; mom had prescription strength cortisone and she'd only use so much before the cold washcloth came out.

Prescription strength cortisone will thin your skin, permanently, if you use too much of it, according to my doctor.

My niece puts Ben-Gay on her skin when she gets the impossible itching. She says the conflicting sensory signals confuse the nerves enough to shut them up. Sometimes she uses Orajel to numb it.

A hairdryer works, too. Seriously. Aim the hot air at your itchy [part] from 6 inches away (basically, far enough away that you don't burn yourself, but close enough that it's hot).

And what happens FIRST is that it starts itching SO MUCH WORSE. And you want to quit. But if you stick with it, all of a sudden, the itching just...stops. And I think it's the same theory as using Ben-Gay -- the heat overloads the nerve for a while and you stop itching.

Hate.Itching.

My auntie had the shingles so bad everyone was talking about the pain and the itch. When the vaccine became available I hustled myself in for the shot. They didn't give me any trouble about being too young after I explained that my Dad and little sister had already had shingles.

I used the hair dryer trick when I had a cast on my leg back in the Seventies when dinosaurs roamed the nation's driver's education programs. I taped a skinny vacuum cleaner attachment to the hair dryer, set in on Low, and managed to avoid sticking things into the cast to scratch.

No hummingbirds today, but: woodpecker! I thought the neighbor was doing a craft project, but no. A black and white woodpecker was checking out their tree where the bark is bad. So there is still plenty of Nature around here despite the fact that the neighbors all like spraying various noxious substances along the property line. We like to think we offer a little slice of habitat with our landscape.

I did the hairdryer thing several years ago with an unexplained case of hives. I only burned myself a little.

If you don't want to do the hairdryer thing, or have a large area of itch, a SCALDING hot shower or bath works similarly.

The hummingbird and woodpecker news reminds me - my stepfather has decided to put up a birdhouse that is specially crafted to appeal to screech owls. He looked up everything about proper height to hang it, what direction to face it, etc. in hope of luring some of the local owls to their property.

When I told him I once spotted a Great Horned Owl in their back yard, he looked like he'd woken up to find out that he'd slept through Christmas.