This is a striped back scorpion.
It was crawling up my calf late last night while I was enjoying movie night.
This is the actual one, only after I killed it and one of the cats played with it. I was surprised how calm I was when I flicked it off my leg. For the next half hour, I was doing an "OMG" dance around the bedroom trying to find it and visualizing a nest of them under my bed. When I did find it scurrying around the baseboards, I squealed and slapped it with my sandal, which brought my terrier to the rescue.
Pushing the eager terrier back and slamming the critter with my sandal, I wondered why not one of my cats had alerted me to it. Why else would you have multiple, critter-killing kitties if not to take care of the creepy crawlies? Certainly not for the joys of litterbox cleaning, shedding hair clumps and hairballs?
It took me a while to overcome my fear and crawl into bed. This was only after tucking the sheets in tightly and then tearing them up just making sure no scorpion had taken refuge there.
I've heard some people keep scorpions as pets. Not me. Few critters make me cringe and scorpions are one of them. They look prehistorically dangerous and I have experience in how frightfully painful the sting is. Yet now as I sit here recalling the experience, I wished I hadn't panicked, had captured the scorpion alive and taken it outside - far from the house - and released it.
Some would think that silly, but as scary as they are, they do eat bugs. They do serve a purpose, just not in my house.
On the other hand, I have yet to find any redeemable quality for fire ants. I take vengeful glee in kicking a nest mound and dropping fire ant killing stuff on it. (I've learned never to kick a fire ant mound twice.) Since I moved to central Texas 10 years ago, spring has always been heralded by fire ant bites. This year they are harder to locate because of the dryness, but they are here. I have the festering, itching bites to prove it.
my sister was stung by a scorpion once and they are quite painful! I totally feel your uneasiness as last summer I found a fiddleback spider in my bed sheets at our little cabin in the woods, and let me tell you, to this day I pull all the sheets back and look under all the corners of the mattress before hopping into bed, even though I know they are relatively loners.
ReplyDeleteAnd my little Daisy thinks her purpose in life is to hold down the throw pillows on the sofa and also to keep my lap warm if I happen to sit on same said sofa! for these gifts, I keep her fed and her litterbox clean, and yes, clean up the hairballs when they happen!