This One's Gonna Sting

I think I speak for all of mankind, excluding a few phylogeneticists, taxodermists, biogeographers, and weirdos, when I say I want nothing to do with scorpions. Yeah, those eight-legged invertebrate bundles of joy. My dad went to Tucson, Arizona, when I was kid and came back with a rather large scorpion inside a rounded glass display. It was posed with its stinger raised, ready to strike. Pretty much ever since that moment scorpions have run a close second to tarantulas on my rather informal list of Things I Don't Want To See When I Turn On The Bedroom Light. I even hate that song "Winds of Change."

But don't take my word for it: incompetent henchmen have tried to kill James Bond no less than three times by placing a scorpion in his bed.

And Jillian's afraid of your basic honey bee, so you can imagine our collective delight when I found this charming fellow in the bathtub a few days back:

Perhaps most disturbing of all was how fast the little guy could move. He scurried back and forth at a pace normally reserved for, I don't know, cockroaches or something less venomous. Luckily he was encased by the bathtub's steep walls, which made him a temporary exhibit in our own little Pet-At-Your-Own-Risk Zoo. I say temporary because the trusty butt end of a Nalgene bottle soon ended this particular scorpion's foray into the human world. But maybe he was merely the exploratory committee for a much larger group residing near the waste water drain.

Two months ago we found a lizard on the bathroom floor. He was just kind of cute--we simply trapped him inside Tupperware and re-released him into the wild. But now a scorpion...what next? Might a cactus begin to grow up out of the toilet?

But it's fine. I found this reassuring tidbit on some all-about-arachnids website: "The sting of the European scorpion is mildly dangerous to humans but is unlikely to be fatal unless the person is very young, very old, infirm or particularly susceptible." That last qualifier is nice and vague.