I was taking advantage of the great outdoors to transplant tomato plants into bigger containers yesterday and got a tick on me.
We had a mild winter here and they said it is going to be a bad tick year.
I am close to old lyme and always have lyme disease on the back of my mind.

Deer Ticks used to cover me up whenever I would walk in the many of the woodlands in New England, starting about now on the calendar. How I didn’t get Lyme disease I’ll never know. I did read somewhere once that on some island in the state of Rhode Island every adult tested positive for exposure to the Lyme disease causing pathogen. I suppose many people’s immune system fights off the disease.

I never understood the mild winter, high tick correlation as by that logic other places with routinely milder winters than New England, abundant deer and other requirements for ticks ought to covered in ticks, but many are not. I think the mild winter, high tick population is something that gets repeated often without much data to support the conclusion.

My dog had ticks in March (!), which is very early for my area. I live in a high risk TBE area, so I know hardly anyone who isn't vaccinated against it. Haven't had lyme disease yet, so that's good I guess - taking into account that a few ticks a year are pretty much unavoidable ...
Let me tell you, ticks are by far my least favorite animals. Just typing up this paragraph makes me feel phantom ticks all over my body.

Pre-covid I had a tick on my back and had to go to a walk-in clinic to have it removed.
When I called prior to going they wanted to know what type it was.
Like I'm an Entomology expert.
They removed it and tossed it out.
Not having it analyzed? Labs are too busy and it wasn't on me long enough.
My uncle had lyme disease before they knew what lyme disease was and he got all fouled up.

They also say there was a ferry boat from hannibals' plum island to old lyme and that is the 1st town that had an outbreak back when.