Lambchop, please, please be careful. Marian may be a cute little non-planarian, but remember – she is still a wild animal. I would so hate to see the same thing happen to you that happened to Roy. Or Sigfried. Whichever. You are so much cuter with a head and without your guts sucked out.
Uh oh.
I wouldn’t worry about hearing that creature clawing through the front door. That looks to be a scanning electron micrograph of some sort of mite. I would guess that creature is likely to be less than 1mm long. I would like to know what it is, though!
Yeah, but now we’re going to have to hear how these things are living all around us, in our beds, in our pillows, everywhere, eating our sloughed off skin cells! Yuck!
No, no, they’re HUGE! 'Bout the size of your average well-fed cat, but they get bigger. You have to go into deepest wooded Minnesota to find them. Fortunately they’re slow. Taste like chicken, too. A stout club will get you by just fine. Just don’t miss the first time. They may be slow, but their extendable mouthparts aren’t, especially when they’re pissed off. You might be wanting duct tape to hold you together until you make it to the ER.
Actually, it is a forest critter, a wee mite that feeds on decaying leaves.
The yuck comes from whether or not you have allergies. Some people are allergic to mite bites. Others are allergic to their feces, which are an extremely fine air-born dust. Just imagine the bio-swamps called beds that we jump into every night. 
djm
Ack. I remember years ago I heard those wee beasties referred to as “the six-legged sheep that graze in our eyebrows.” (Or maybe it was 8-legged? Not sure what those appendages in front are, and I don’t really want to know). After finding out what that meant, it was difficult to suppress the impulse to shave off my eyebrows at once. Being reminded of it makes me want to sleep on an air mattress with no sheets.
Sorry, Scotty, but there are mites that live in our open pores. There are mites that live on our hairs or lashes, right up under the skin. There are many types of mites and they are everywhere. They control our bank accounts, they influence our shopping choices, and one night I caught a bunch of them trying to carry off my credit card. The best you can hope to do is roll around alot at night, trying to squish a few, but loosing more dead skin cells in the process and … 
Man, I love obsessing about things that are beyond my control. 
djm
My bed is not a bioswamp. 
It is a freshly laundered, hypoallergenic nest of fluffy, ecologically sound, natural-fibers.
Marian Update: She is much perkier today! In fact, she’s actively hunting. Attacked her dinner . . . I do mean “attacked” . . . and swam off with it.
It’s a good thing her kind doesn’t get any bigger!
You know, this is an odd thing. When I was little, on St. Patrick’s Day some kids were giving me a hard time because I wasn’t wearing green. Then another kid said that I really was because we all had little green invisible bugs crawling on us. I told my dad about this amazing fact and he straightened me out. I thought.
I didn’t really know that mites lived in our EYEBROWS!!! and our PORES!!! Surely this is not true!!! I really have bugs crawling all over me, that actually live on me all the time???
Oh, I can’t believe this!!! Dang! I knew about bacteria.
Okay. No problem. But rear ends of mites.
Shoot! Oh yuck! 
Close-up
2nd Prize
Eyelash mites
Stephen Gschmeissner
Makes you wonder what they look like all covered with mascara.
Dust mite:
Magnified abt. 2000 times! You’d never know it’s there.
Oh, yes I do. I can feel 'em even now, crawling up my legs, hiding under the bed, eating the wife’s jam. They’re everywhere, I tell you! 
djm
What’s this about then?
OH!!! SO NOW I AM ACCUSED OF BEING A FOMICATOR, EH??? MODERATOR!!! MODERATOR!!! 
<ekk> <ekk> <ekk> <bom>
djm
This guy’s kinda cute for a mite:
Soil-dwelling and herbivorous, though.
The operative word is “false.”
Seems to me, those eyelash mites aren’t parasites, at least in the way I understand a parasite. The eyelash mites consume dead skin, which could be a symbiotic grooming function, rather than a parasite/host relationship.
Best wishes,
Jerry
You know, I think you’ve hit on it there. I was indeed thinking of the situation as parasitism rather than as mutualism. I’m sure those dead skin cells need to be removed and I have no idea how I would do it myself. I’ll have to see if there are any phobias about beneficial symbionts. I guess it would be called beneficial symbiontosis, or mutualosis, or something .
Looks kinda like a cross between a bunny and a Volkswagen.
But, seriously, do you think that all the skin and hair and etc. mites sit around and pass around pictures of humans and gross out about the fact that they are living on THAT!