Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Creepy Crawlers

This past weekend I decided that I wanted to re-arrange my house. I do not have a lot of furniture, so this is not actually that exciting. Mostly I wanted to move my guest bed 90 degrees so it was up against an adjacent wall. In order to do this I had to move a few items that were perched against said adjacent wall. This included a large teal bucket, the box my blender came in, a pair of shoes, a cesta and the enormous binder I created for GAD.

 Things were going fine until I moved the GAD binder. If only I had left the binder, well life would be worse that it is now, but I would not have have known that. Not sure which is worse. So I pick up the binder and I see a scorpion. At first I think it is dead. It is a black scorpion, but its back is brown. It looks like it is already dead and starting to decay. (It had been a while since I had picked the binder up, don't judge.) So I decide I will get a shoe and give it a good smack, just to make sure. You can never be too cautious about these things. Well apparently I was not cautious enough. I brought the shoe down hard, but not hard enough to kill the still very alive scorpion. But what I learned as soon as I lifted the sneaker up was unsettling to say the least. I was momentarily frozen and horrified as I watched baby scorpions flee off the back of the larger mama scorpion and into every crevice and corner of my house. As thin as a needle and as long as my pinky finger nail, I realized that they would be quite hard to find.

I tried to shake off my goosebumps as I figured I needed to at least finish off the mama scorpion. So I killed her and swept her outside. (Which is what I should have done in the first place, lesson learned.) I was able to kill about six or seven of the babies. But when researched later, I found out that scorpions can have up to 50 babies. Lets just think about that. Or not, it makes my skin crawl. I have moved on, but am wearing shoes in the house at all times.

Also in the past few days I have found two tarantulas at my house. The first Bella was playing with on the front porch. It was mostly dead, but I gave it a good stomp just to make sure. The second was a little more disconcerting, I found it in my shower. Now my shower is outside, but still, that is not what I want to find as I am going in to bathe. This one was very much alive, and I made my host sister Iviana kill it for me. It was hanging out in a corner and I knew that if I tried to kill it, more than likely it would involve screaming and the giant spider escaping. So I brought in an expert. Thank goodness for Iviana.

I cannot tell you why these creatures are choosing now, the end of my service, to flock to my house. I can just hope that some sort of creepy crawler bulletin has been sent out and I will not need to deal with more of these little guys. As for the baby scorpions, I have not seen any more in the past few days. Melida says that they will probably just die on their own because they were so small, and no longer have their mother for protection. I am putting Bella on task, get 'em girl! 

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