If I have to have a scorpion in my toilet, I should at least get a blog post out of it

I don’t have much to say about this:

Oh, wait. No, I do. Until I saw the picture to refresh my memory, I had forgotten that my charism is freaking out about scorpions.

[Before I get started, let me apologize to any new readers who may have mistakenly thought this was a classy blog and were not prepared to see a close-up picture of a toilet and a scorpion when they checked for new posts at Conversion Diary today.]

So anyway, I was walking by the hallway bathroom yesterday morning and noticed some object in the bottom of the toilet. In this house it could have been any number of things, none of them good, so I was relatively prepared that my findings were not going to improve my day. I was not, however, prepared for it to be a scorpion.

My first thought was to reflect that Yaya, for whom potty training is a second religion, so effectively whipped everyone into shape around here that even our scorpions use the potty now.

The joking ended abruptly, though, when I realized: it got in there by itself. My husband was out with the kids, and it hadn’t been in there when they left. The most likely route would be that it crawled under the space between the bottom toilet seat and the bowl, i.e. WHERE NO ONE COULD SEE IT. Which means…well, lest I cause Feedburner’s servers to melt down from mass use of the “unsubscribe” button, let me just leave it at this: I was prepared that our family might have to deal with stings on our feet from scorpions hiding in shoes, or on our torsos, backs, arms, legs or faces from scorpions in the bed at night. But there was one thing I had not considered. And the possibility of it is now seared into my brain forever.

That night we went to dinner with my dad and grandfather, and I knew that this wasn’t going to be an impromptu support group. I’ve mentioned before my Texan relatives and I just cannot seem to get on the same page about scorpions. As I said in this post, when I would shriek about the very real possibility of being stung in bed while sleeping, my relatives would think that the problem was simply that I couldn’t figure out what to do in case of a nocturnal scorpion attack (“you just brush them off”) or that I was concerned only about the toxicity level of the sting (“it’s not like they’re rattlesnakes…though I did see one the other day…”) But they did try.

When I recounted the story to my dad, he nodded like I was telling him that I went to the store to get some milk. Then he remembered that I had that hang-up abut scorpions, and dutifully put a very kind and sympathetic look on his face. You could just see his mind in overdrive to think through all the angles to try to figure out what bothered me about this. You could tell he wanted to comfort me with some fatherly advice. So finally he offered: “They’re no worse than tarantula bites.”

I just kind of stared at him, wondering if there’s an official repository of Most Epic Encouragement Fails to which I could submit that statement.

He tried again: “Remember that time I woke up to that scorpion stinging me on the knee? “

“Yeah…” I said, eagerly waiting to hear the part about how it didn’t hurt or the sting ended up giving him superpowers or something.

“I didn’t die,” he said. Sensing that that might not have caused my quirky phobia to instantly dissipate once and for all, he tried another angle: “Plus, it’s not like that time Uncle Benton had one fall off the ceiling and sting him on the face while he was sleeping,” he added, pointing to the bedroom about five yards away from where I was sitting, where my uncle had been staying when he was stung. “His eye sure did swell up!”

And to think, if I had been in my dad’s situation of waking to a scorpion attacking my knee, I might have thought my glass was half empty! It was nice to have that little helping of Chicken Soup for the Texan Soul to inspire me for the rest of the evening, especially as I was falling asleep.

I mentioned it on Twitter, of course. This is one of those times that people who follow me on Twitter get a payoff for all the inane and boring tweets they put up with. It’ll be weeks of “I’m tired,” and “I stayed up too late,” and “Why do I stay up so late?”, and then, boom! “SCORPION IN MY TOILET!!!!!!”

Luckily the Twitterati had my back, and I got some advice for how to handle this all with prayer and grace. The guys at Creative Minority Report were able to offer me encouragement from a Catholic perspective:

And Scoutsigns weighed in with some practical suggestions:

Scoutsigns pointed out in another tweet that it was probably still alive — scorpions have been known to live for more than a day under water. OF COURSE IT WAS STILL ALIVE. I have no idea why I thought a mere few hours submerged under water would mean it was dead. Since I keep having to learn this lesson over and over again, I guess I need to make a flowchart to put on the living room wall to review in case of a scorpion sighting:

Anyway, I hope you’re all enjoying your Memorial Day. If you’re not, you can always remember that at least you didn’t just find a scorpion in your toilet.

A day in the life of a Scorpionator

Some people have asked if there was any one last straw that led to my sudden internet fast a couple of weeks ago. Others have asked for details about the nature of my hysterical tweets from the afternoon of Friday, October 2nd. In this post I shall address both inquiries.

The afternoon of Friday the 2nd started out perfectly lovely. I’d put my youngest two children down for naps and had set up my three-year-old daughter and five-year-old son for a little quiet time. All day I’d been drifting over to my computer, checking email here, reading blogs there, and I couldn’t wait to finish up all the things I’d started in my sporadic computer time throughout the day. Just as I was settling down into the couch and opening up my laptop, I heard the worst four words that could be uttered in this house:

“Look, mommy, a scorpion!”

My three-year-old daughter was pointing to a scorpion. That was about six inches away from her leg.

I tossed my computer onto the couch and jumped up to confirm that it wasn’t some new scorpion gag toy that some soon-to-be-ex friend had planted in the living room. Nay, it was real. And big — one of the largest scorpions we’ve seen in the house to date. I didn’t want the kids to panic, so I said, “Run! Run to the couch NOW NOW NOW before it stings you! Hurry! It’s going to get you! Run! AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!”

The commotion prompted the scorpion to saunter over to the middle of the living room floor. And this is where the story would end for most people. Most people’s internal dialogue would go something like:

“I will grab the nearest heavy object and drop it on the menacing arachnid.” Boom. “I’m glad that’s over with.”

But we’re talking about me, and nothing can be that simple, especially where scorpions are involved. My internal dialogue went something like:

“I will grab the nearest heavy object and drop it on the menacing arachnid. But WHAT IF IT DOESN’T WORK?! My ‘killing scorpions on carpet by dropping heavy things on them’ success rate is 0%! And what book should I use anyway? Is my husband’s Corporate Finance textbook big enough, or is this an Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary job? I know, I could ask the internet! If I want to seek advice from people on Twitter, how could I summarize this in 140 characters seeing as how I’m going to need AT LEAST 100 characters just for exclamation points?”

Meanwhile, as I was standing around analyzing my situation from every possible angle and thinking of how I could turn it into a clever tweet, the scorpion moseyed on over to a location under our long walnut buffet. This was bad. This was very bad. The buffet stands less than a foot above the carpet, making it impossible to get a book on top of the scorpion as long as it was under there. And then, just to make sure the suck-o-meter was dialed up to a 10, the scorpion crawled onto the side of a large book under the buffet.

The situation had gone from bad to worse. There was no way I could get it.

I seriously considered just staring at it for three hours until my husband got home from work, but the scorpion was headed toward the dreaded toy pit. To fully understand the ominousness of this trajectory, you first have to understand that my husband and I are both the only people of our generation to have children on both sides of our family. The result is that our children are blessed with many, many toys. Many. Like, I sometimes have dreams about frantically writing thank-you notes only to have dumptrucks overflowing with new packages addressed to my children come and pour their entire contents down upon me as I write. The result is that it looks like a Toys R Us exploded in the southwest corner of our living room; we’ve given up on fancy organizational techniques like throwing toys in boxes when the kids aren’t playing with them, and just kind of rake everything over to one part of the living room at the end of the day.

And I knew that if the scorpion made it into the toy pit, it would be all over.

“All over” as in I would never in a thousand years be able to find it, and if I did it would undoubtedly involve being stung. “All over” as in despite all my “ha ha I’m moving” jokes I would NEVER SET FOOT IN THIS HOUSE AGAIN if that scorpion got lost in the toy pile. I had to get it.

“I have GOT to get this thing before it goes into the toys and I lose it and then it stings one of us when we least expect it!” I thought it a blind panic. To calm myself down, I decided to call my husband for reassurance. It would be nice to hear the voice of someone who could just laugh at the whole thing and point out how silly I was being. When I described the situation to him, he responded:

“You have GOT to get that thing before it goes into the toys and you lose it and then it STINGS ONE OF US WHEN WE LEAST EXPECT IT!!!!!” Or something like that. Perhaps he wasn’t quite as frantic as I perceived him to be through the lens of my scorpion-induced mania, but suffice it to say that his answer was not to chuckle and tell me that it would be fine.

My husband did have a good practical suggestion though: Since it wasn’t in a good smashing position, I should use bug spray. I went and grabbed the last can of Raid from the laundry room, aimed it at the scorpion, went to push the plunger…and hesitated. Not pushing the plunger right when I had the nerve was a fatal mistake. I’d psyched myself out. The problem was that I had major hesitations about using wasp spray for scorpions. I mean, seriously, THESE THINGS DON’T DIE. If the fancy exterminator chemicals only get them to pretend to be dead, why on earth should I believe that some namby-pamby grocery store wasp spray would do anything at all? Shoot, for all I knew maybe that’s what they like to drink for breakfast! This train of thought ended up with me imagining spraying the Raid only to find out that it actually gives them more speed and strength, the angry arachnid now running right at me as I trip and fall and find myself unable to move as it stings me over and over again while I scream and the children come to my aid only to be stung themselves and…yeah. Suffice it to say I psyched myself out.

After some all-caps Twitter updates, Google searches to find out if wasps and scorpions are in the same genus, countless prayers requesting the support of the unknown patron saints of both scorpion killing and neurotic wimps, and rearranging the living room furniture to make the ottoman and some couch pillows into a scorpion-proof bunker behind which I could hide, I got ready to spray. For real this time. My finger was on the trigger again, but then I thought: What if this doesn’t have the range it says it does?

In what I would later come to think of as famous last words, I said to myself, “Ah, yes, I should really test it first!” So I went outside, picked out a threatening blade of grass and showed it who was boss with my Raid spraying skills. Then another one. OK, good, this stuff definitely had some range. I went inside, moved my bunker back a couple feet to give me even more room in case this spray only made the scorpion mad, and got ready again. Then I decided to test it inside the house. You know, in case it, uhh, spayed differently in indoor air. After squirting it at a blank spot on the wall, I was ready. Well, just one more time. OK, now I was ready.

But wait! Maybe what I needed was some music to help me get up my nerve. I put my iPod on shuffle and got back down behind my bunker just as some Matisyahu song was finishing up. In a you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up moment, the next song that came on was the ultimate “one chance to prove yourself and win a great struggle in a David-and-Goliath sort of way” theme song, Eye Of the Tiger. As those first DUNH…DUHN-DUHN-DUHN guitar riffs started (OK, that’s hard to write, but y’all know what I’m talking about, right?) I focused my eyes on the scorpion 12 feet away, aimed the can, and sprayed.

And to my abject horror, I heard only a weak phhhhhhhhhh sound as a light cloud of chemcials came from the can.

I’d used up all the spray in my many tests. The can was basically empty.

In the split second it took for a couple of minuscule droplets to float over from the can to the scorpion’s hideout under the buffet, the thought flashed through my mind, “This isn’t going to be good.” And it wasn’t. One of the drops was a direct hit. The scorpion was unamused. And when scorpions get unamused, they get fast.

In a flash it got down from the book and took off, its stinger ready to take someone out. I instinctively started running the opposite direction, in the back of my mind thinking that I would eventually stop, perhaps somewhere around the U.S.-Canadian border. But when I glanced over my shoulder I saw to my horror that it was not running in my direction, but towards the toy pit. And it was only about a foot away.

“Get it, mommy!” my son shouted as the distance between the scorpion and a toy tractor closed quickly.

The awareness that I would literally never sleep in this house again if I lost that scorpion flashed through my mind, and — with Eye of the Tiger still blasting — I turned around, slammed open the childproof gate and ran back into the living room, knocking over a stack of laundry and kicking over a pile of children’s books that were in my way, stepping on a baby doll and reaching out to within a few inches of the scorpion to douse it with the last few dribbles of Raid.

In one of the more anticlimactic moments I’ve experienced lately, it just died. Instantly. The spray worked just fine.

I’d just thrown a book over it to stall any sneaky coming-back-from-the-dead moments until my husband got home, when I heard my two youngest children waking up from their naps. I went to get them, and when I came back downstairs it smelled like…well, like some idiot had sprayed Raid all over living room, so I announced that we were all playing outside until daddy got home.

A while later my husband walked in to behold the dismantled couch, the ottoman bunker, the scattered laundry and toys, the chemical residue dripping from the wall. To say that it looked like thieves had ransacked the place would be to imply way too much of a feel of order or purpose to the mess; to say it looked like thieves intended to ransack it but decided to stay and get drunk and just thrash around for a while would be getting closer to reality.

When my husband asked me how my day was, I said with a sigh, “It’s been tough — I haven’t had any time to relax and do stuff on my computer today!”

He looked back at the house, looked at me, and observed: “Today one of the kids came close to being stung by the biggest scorpion we’ve seen around here in a while, you stared at it in agony for the better part of an hour, hosed down the house with Raid, finally killed the scorpion, somehow tore the living room apart in the process…and your take is that it was a bad afternoon because you didn’t get enough computer time?”

And that’s when I decided it was time for a break.

RELATED

• Brother Scorpion, Sister Mosquito
• 20 things I learned in a week without my computer
• Greetings from the House ‘O Scorpions

Thanks to Emily for suggesting the word “Scorpionator.”

Hospitality and scorpion juice

Lately I’ve been inspired by the idea of Christian hospitality. In the past few months I’ve been making some baby steps towards playing hostess more regularly, not only inviting friends to my home more often but doing little extras to treat them as honored guests. As difficult as it is for a disorganized introvert like me, I’ve learned to delight in going the extra mile by tidying up the house or even by having a cold pitcher of frugal fruit tea ready upon my friends’ arrival.

When fellow blogger and good friend Mrs. Darwin showed up at my door this morning, it was a moment of realizing how far I’ve come in this area. The breakfast dishes had been cleared and put away, the table was ready for lunch, there was an array of toys on the porch for the children to play with, and I’d even thought to stock up on cheese pizza to have a kid-friendly lunch handy.

As the children dashed outside, I invited Mrs. Darwin to make herself comfortable in the living room. I offered her a tall glass of water with a splash of lemonade and lots of ice — the perfect refreshment for a summer’s day! In what was my crowning achievement in this new endeavor of honoring my guests through casual yet elegant entertaining, I’d whipped up a pan of Kalyn’s scrumptious mushroom feta breakfast casserole. I thought it might be nice for my friend and I to dine on more sophisticated fare than the children’s cheese pizza, and couldn’t wait to surprise her with this Martha Stewart-esque twist for our little playdate. I had to admit, I was quickly becoming an old pro at this whole gracious hospitality thing.

After popping the casserole in the toaster oven for reheating, I set a timer and turned to tell Mrs. Darwin about our lunch menu.

Unfortunately, I saw something on my kitchen floor as I walked over to her, and the sentence came out as: “Could I offer you some [expletive] SCORPION? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO THERE IS A [expletive] SCORPION ON THE KITCHEN FLOOR!”

It was at that moment that I realized: when I instituted my “no scorpion handling” policy this time last year, boldly vowing that I would never attempt to kill a scorpion again, there was one little detail I’d glossed over: WHAT, THEN, WILL I DO THE NEXT TIME I SEE ONE IF I’M NOT GOING TO KILL IT? The only other time I’d seen a scorpion in the house since then was when my mother-in-law was here, and she put it down the disposal. I found myself deeply wishing that I had pondered the question a bit more before, oh, finding one sitting right in front of me on my kitchen floor with six children under age seven in my house.

Noticing that I was backed against a wall, spending most of my mental energy trying not to spew profanity, Mrs. Darwin got up and suggested that we get rid of it. After listening to me hysterically list counter-arguments along the lines of “THESE THINGS DON’T DIE!” and “NO SERIOUSLY I AM NOT KIDDING YOU WE’LL JUST MAKE IT MAD!!!”, she pointed out that, short of packing all the kids up and leaving the house, we didn’t have a choice.

While I was contemplating the logistics of abandoning the house and putting it up for sale as is, Mrs. Darwin interrupted my thoughts to ask me to get her a big book. She was going to take control of the situation. She would kill the scorpion.

After grabbing the heaviest textbook from our bookshelf and tossing it in her general direction, I resumed cowering in the corner.

“IT’S NOT GOING TO DIE!” I predicted ominously while jumping onto a chair to protect myself from danger. “What if it stings you? What if it starts running right when you let go of the book? What if you miss? OH IT’S SO TERRIBLE I CAN’T LOOK!!”

After becoming increasingly frightened herself due to my naysaying and general hysteria, Mrs. Darwin finally dropped the book.

I immediately told her of the limited success this book-dropping technique had the last time I tried it, and asked if she wouldn’t mind jumping on it a bit. After my guest was done jumping on the book to make sure the poisonous arachnid was properly smashed, I asked from the safe confines of my kitchen chair if she wouldn’t mind moving it back and forth a bit for good measure.

We couldn’t leave the book there all day since it was right in the path of the children’s play area (THOUGH BELIEVE ME I THOUGHT ABOUT IT), so it was time for the moment of truth: we had to move the book. We had to see if it was still alive.

Mrs. Darwin hesitantly approached the book. “IT’S GOING TO MOVE!” I screeched as I jumped down from my chair and ran into the hall. She took a broom and pushed the book a bit. Nothing. She pushed it a bit more to lift it slightly, and we saw:

Mashed scorpion.

Hindsight being 20/20, I recalled that that time that I’d seen a scorpion survive a book dropping was when it was on the carpet. Ah, yes. As she now pushed the book away to reveal a pulverized, mangled, surprisingly liquidy scorpion carcass, I realized that perhaps dropping books on scorpions on hard linoleum works just fine. Perhaps it was not in fact necessary to have my guest jump on it and smear it back and forth. Lesson learned.

Mrs. Darwin then offered to deal with the mushy remains for me. In the spirit of Christian hospitality, I felt that it was the right thing to do to offer to get the dustpan for her rather than make her fetch it herself.

“It’s gone,” she announced as I heard the toiled flush from our guest bathroom.

Just then, the timer beeped. The casserole was ready. After I finished wiping what could only be described as scorpion juice off of my kitchen floor, I rinsed off my hands and resumed my sentence from a few moments before: “Could I offer you some mushroom feta casserole?”

And that’s how we do hospitality at my house.

Being stung by scorpions in bed: some people are bothered by this idea, others are not, and never the twain shall meet

Yaya and I had another go-round about scorpions today (although this time, thankfully, we were talking about theoretical scorpions and not actual scorpions that were being shaken in cups in front of my face). It all started when I explained to her that that it keeps me up at night to ponder the following data:

In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that a few weeks ago a nice friend at a baby shower told me that when she lived in France they had scorpions in their house and this never happened to her. At first her statement shattered my perception that scorpions always target people in beds at night. But then I had a delayed reaction in which I realized that she said this was in France. These are French scorpions. These are work/life balance scorpions. Maybe her experience indicates that not all scorpions are as inherently aggressive and creepy as I thought they were, or maybe les scorpions were en grève because the threadcount on her sheets wasn’t high enough. The data is inconclusive, hence it has been omitted from the chart.

Anyway, after taking a moment to ask if I seriously lie awake at night stressing out about things in chart form (yes, welcome to the world of a neurotic nerd), my mother-in-law gave me this look that all my Texan relatives give me when the subject comes up, a sort of bemused smile that says, “And the problem is…?” I wanted to react by sputtering hysterically, “And the problem is WAKING UP TO SCORPIONS STINGING ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT WHILE I AM SOUND ASLEEP HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE WHAT THE PROBLEM IS THERE?!” but I decided to make a futile attempt to have a civilized dialogue on the subject, out of morbid curiosity if nothing else.

Yaya took this opportunity to explain to me that it is only because of my pampered middle-class lifestyle that I even worry about this. She offered some light stories from her childhood of scorpions attacking them in the course of daily life. “Those suckers sure would get us good every time we got on that tire swing!” she recounted with a chuckle. “And we didn’t worry about it when they got in our beds — you’d just brush ‘em off if they got ya’ while you were sleeping.” She assured me that if I’d grown up in rural Texas in the days before fancy-schmancy houses with things like insulation and well-sealed walls, having a few scorpions in the bed here and there would be just a natural part of life for me.

Umm, no.

This is not, of course, something I can prove empirically. But I am certain — like really, really certain — that under no circumstances would I ever be nonchalant about scorpions in my bed at night. Maybe I am missing some sort of gene that makes you chilled out about surprise nocturnal attacks by stinging arachnids, but I do not believe that my distress about this situation is due to lack of exposure to it.

Her next point — one that I’ve heard before and found no less perplexing this time than the first 100 times I heard it from other Texan relatives — was that scorpion stings are no worse than wasp stings. Really? And to think I was all stressed out about this! I mean, seriously, that was the only thing I was worried about, the toxicity level of the venom. Because, other than that, there is nothing at all disturbing about being woken from a peaceful slumber in the still of the night by an explosion of pain and realizing that there is a scorpion wrapped up in your pajamas, attacking you, repeatedly stinging you, and between the darkness and your delirious state you cannot immediately locate it to get it off of you. As long as it’s not worse than a wasp sting, that should be fine. …Oh, wait, no, that still sounds like a hellish nightmare.

At this point the conversation ended with me uttering a long, defeated sigh and Yaya needing to yell at someone named Billy Ray on her cell phone.

What I have found is this: if you don’t see what is disturbing about the idea of being stung by scorpions in bed at night, it is not something I can explain to you. I have tried repeatedly to show Yaya and my other Texan relatives my way of thinking on this, to find common ground in our different viewpoints, and I submit that it cannot be done. It is an unbridgeable gap.

At least I have a blog. Evidently if this ever does happen I will get no sympathy from my relatives about it; but hopefully, somewhere out there on the internet, I will be able to find at least one person who could see why I might be unsettled about scorpions in my bed.

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