I'd been told there were scorpions in the Atlanta area and that some people found them in their homes, but I'd never seen one. Until last week.
It was Saturday night. Late. I walked into my bedroom and saw something on the floor between my bed and the bathroom and I went to have a look. All it took was one glance to know it was a scorpion. They're very distinct looking with their claws and that stinging tail. Mine was about an inch and a half long. I'm assured that these are "small."
I grabbed some bug spray and let him have it. He didn't react. Was he already dead? But I kept spraying, and then he'd had enough. He started to amble away. With attitude.
Panicked at the thought of having him disappear somewhere in my bedroom, I stepped on him. Luckily, I had on my thick-soled Birkenstock sandals.
To pick him up, I took a sheet and a half of paper towel, folded it all up, donned a silicone oven mitt and tossed his carcass away. This incident shook me up so much that I stayed up till after 1am, until I was too exhausted to think about it anymore.
Monday at work, everyone assured me that it was some freak thing, that scorpions inside homes were rare. I decided they must be right and wrote it off as a fluke. Then Tuesday happened.
Last Tuesday, I got up for work and saw this great big spider next to the baseboard. This was only the second big spider I'd seen in my new house and the other one had been dead. I got the vacuum cleaner, sucked this one up, and went to get some coffee. All was well. Then.
Things deteriorated when I went to rinse my coffee cup before I started to get ready for work. There was a scorpion walking across my kitchen floor!
Lesson learned from the first one, I stepped on this one right away. His tail came up, ready to sting. ::shudder:: The crunch sounded good and I got the vacuum again and sucked his body up.
Since then, I've been sleeping with the light on. They're nocturnal creatures. As I'm writing this, I'm waiting for the pest control guy to come and check out my scorpion situation. You see, scorpions are unaffected by most pesticides. There are very specific scorpion poisons and I'm hoping the exterminator will lay down the ring of death around my house so that I never have one of those things inside again.
